New York Times
July 22, 2021
BETTER TO HAVE GONE
Love, Death, and the Quest for Utopia in Auroville
By Akash Kapur
Utopia’s finest hour, Akash Kapur writes in “Better to Have Gone,” is the very beginning, “when the dream remains unsullied.” The phrase has the ring of preordainment: From the heights of a vision, there is nowhere to go but down.
As it does — viciously then tragically — in his memoir, which is also a group biography, the investigation of a mystery, a meditation on searching and faith, and an act of love. Kapur’s main subject is Auroville, a 53-year-old intentional community in southern India where both he and his wife, Auralice, were raised, and where, in 1986, her mother and adoptive father died. The murky circumstances of their deaths shadow Kapur’s marriage, all the more when he and Auralice move back to Auroville in 2004. There her parents’ fates have been transmuted into a mix of legend, theory and gossip, even as their bodies lie in unmarked graves. Kapur decides (with his wife’s help, though she is not credited as an author) to excavate the past. Knowledge, he hopes, might bring peace.
This is a haunting, heartbreaking story, deeply researched and lucidly told, with an almost painful emotional honesty — the use of present tense weaving a kind of trance. I kept wanting to read “Better to Have Gone” because I found it so gripping; I kept wanting not to read it because I found it so upsetting. The image that came to mind, again and again, was of human lives being dashed against the rocks of rigid belief.
Like much of reality, the story Kapur tells sounds almost too implausible to be true. A Frenchwoman bonds with a yogi in the southern Indian city of Pondicherry and begins administering his ashram. When he dies, she takes over and in her 80s conceives of an experimental township, to be constructed on a barren plateau nearby. Auroville will belong to no nation, will elevate the spiritual over the material and will be a place of “concord and harmony.” A French architect draws up a master plan, which includes at its center a giant sphere covered with gold disks. Meanwhile a group of mostly Western pioneers move out to the plateau, planting seeds in its dry red earth.
The Mother, as everyone calls the Frenchwoman, dies a few years later. Or does she? Her burial inflicts deep trauma on the Frenchman, who has become her most devoted acolyte. For according to the belief system first developed by her sage, Sri Aurobindo, human beings are capable of willing themselves to a new stage of evolution, transcending the body to become a supramental being. The burial has interrupted Mother’s transformation, or so the Frenchman believes. This certainty will lead him, many years later, to guide the lives of two foreigners living in Auroville — a Belgian woman and an American man — down a dangerous and ultimately fatal path. Diane Maes and John Walker will die, after prolonged agony, within a day of each other, she at 36, he at 44. They leave behind a 14-year-old girl named Auralice, who years later will become Kapur’s wife.
Kapur braids the biographies of Diane, a woman of great beauty and perhaps too-great faith, and John, the privileged, cultured scion of an East Coast family, with that of Bernard Enginger, or Satprem, the Frenchman who takes the Mother’s beliefs to extremes — and exhibits extreme indifference to the suffering that results.
Diane is in many ways the heart of the story, yet it is John who is more vivid on the page. Perhaps this is because of the extensive correspondence between him and his family, provided by John’s sister, Gillian, who years later still feels “incandescent rage” at how her brother died. Or perhaps it is because of the milieu into which he was born: His father was the first curator of the National Gallery, and he was descended on his mother’s side from both Mary, Queen of Scots, and Thomas More (“the patron saint of utopia,” as Kapur notes). His respites from the grinding conditions of Auroville in its early years find him at the Dakota apartments in Manhattan, attending parties with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, or in the wealthy enclave of Fishers Island. He has been born with everything, Kapur makes clear, except a calling.
It seems unfair to judge Diane and John from this distance. It is hard not to. Her tempests, and her negligence toward a son who drowns, grate, as does her stubborn self-subjugation. John’s anti-materialism, meanwhile, is bankrolled by his family’s material largess. “Have we become a race of accountants?” he chastises his baffled yet generous father when the senior Walker finally balks at the expenses for John’s dream mansion in Auroville. It’s not clear that his “dilettantish trust-funded journey” ever truly came to an end.
But ultimately neither Diane’s faith nor John’s privilege was enough to save them, and they seem most deserving of compassion. As do those they left behind, whose grief one suspects no amount of investigation and explanation will completely dispel. After John’s death, his 80-year-old father scribbles on a letter his questions: “1. Death certificate. 2. Where is he or his ashes. 3. What did he die of. 4. When did he die.” As Kapur writes, “This father is starved for the most basic information.”
Yet it is John’s father, an establishment figure and a searcher himself, who gives the book its title. “I admire you on your pilgrimage,” he writes his son. “May it have a good ending. But no matter, better to have gone on it than to have stayed here quietly.”
Kapur wants to believe that John and Diane’s suffering and care for each other in their last years and, especially, months gave their lives, if not meaning, at least coherence. His wife, their daughter, seems skeptical about this, and it’s easy to see why. They sacrificed themselves, but for what? So much of what happened, so much of what was believed, in the early years of Auroville sounds deeply loopy from a modern, rational perspective. The first child born in Auroville, named Auroson, is meant to herald the arrival of a new race. But then he drowns. The Mother promptly explains that he wasn’t happy in his body, and the parents should make a new one, into which she will reinsert his soul. A second Auroson is soon born. There was a totalizing quality to it all, with whatever happened contorted to fit the Mother’s teachings.
Part of Kapur’s strength as a guide is that he is attached to reason, yet he yearns for faith. He wants to understand, even if he cannot, quite. Kapur, who is also the author of “India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India” (2012), is excellent about the ideas that animated Auroville and nearly destroyed it. (I did sometimes wish for a map of the township, without which I felt lost in a mythological place, its locales given names like Certitude and Aspiration.) He spares no detail in describing the community’s early years — the idealism, tenacity and zealotry; the challenges of building (the concrete sphere most of all); the heated disputes about how people should live (schools? money? At various points both were rejected). The tensions, between the starched planners who did not live on the plateau and the barely clothed pioneers who did, appeared early and became so savage that those who tried to stay neutral were themselves targeted and ostracized. Books were burned. Kapur makes these factional disputes among a few hundred people not just clear but compelling.
His focus, so intense, is sometimes too narrow. More history of the French colony of Pondicherry, from where Auroville emanated, would have been useful, along with more scrutiny of how India’s colonial history, which left a hangover of both excessive deference to white Westerners and whiplash against that, shaped Auroville. In its creation, foreigners leveraged global inequities and India’s poverty. Would Mother and her devotees have been able to claim the same open land or fall back on the same cheap labor (both human and bullock) if they had been in Europe? The rule of Indira Gandhi, meanwhile, is viewed entirely through the lens of whether she is good for Auroville, not through what her Emergency (which suspended democratic freedoms in the face of internal unrest) meant for India at large.
But Auroville, not India, is Kapur’s subject, and the place emerges as awful and beautiful in equal measure. “Better to Have Gone” ends with an unexpected lightness, even transcendence, as Kapur helps us see what Auroville has given him, gives him still, despite the pain. In his descriptions of its landscape, made so lush by those early pioneers, as well as of the sphere at its heart, he conveys the internal concord and harmony, the peace, that he finds there.
The autophagy of utopian experiments seems nearly inevitable, perhaps because communities founded on ideals rely on individuals to sustain them. Purity is in the eye of the beholder. Time and again places like this have become laboratories not just for political or spiritual or economic experimentation but for what people will do to one another in the name of human improvement.
Yet Kapur is rightly moved by Auroville’s ability to survive its darkest hours and endure for half a century. He is moved, too, by what it represents: the rejection of convention, ambition, materialism, individualism and all the other treadmills we mindlessly walk. The questions Auroville tried to answer lurk somewhere deep in all of us: Is this the only kind of life? Are these the only things that matter? Few of us will live in places like Auroville, but perhaps all of us need them.
Amy Waldman is the author of two novels, “A Door in the Earth” and “The Submission,” and a former South Asia bureau chief for The Times.
BETTER TO HAVE GONE
Love, Death, and the Quest for Utopia in Auroville
By Akash Kapur
Illustrated. 344 pp. Scribner. $27.
A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 1, 2021, Page 1 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Requiem for a Dream
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/22/books/review/better-to-have-gone-akash-kapur.html
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