Creme caramel amidst the
rickshaws
There is a corner of India
which will be forever France.
Jeremy Atiyah joined the hippies and sadhus in Pondicherry
SUNDAY 12 APRIL 1998
THE FRENCH only controlled
one town in India, but what a town. They call it Pondichery, we call it Pondicherry. Either way, you would (rightly) expect it to be a steamy,
sleepy Tamil place of dropping petals and bananas, populated by soft-treading,
barefoot women with flowers in their hair, boney intellectuals on slow-mo
bicycles, ash-smeared sadhus, lepers and hippies from Croydon.
But you would not expect these people to be
obsessed with a 19th-century Cambridge intellectual and a
self-appointed foreign messiah.
A deliberate travesty, but I am trying to make a point. The Cambridge intellectual was
none other than Sri Aurobindo, who took a first in classics, and then became
guru to India's best known
ashram.
At least Sri Aurobindo was Indian. The self-appointed messiah
was French. This was the woman known as the "Mother", whose kindly
face stares down from the walls of every shop, restaurant and hotel room in
town; and who, until her death aged 97 in 1973, had taken responsibility not
only for running the ashram, but also for founding the nearby
"international" city of Auroville.
But was there not just a little irony in a town full of Indians
being so deferential to a member of the former imperial power?
"You are too immature," a bearded ashramite told me
over an unpretentious communal lunch of brown rice, yoghurt, vegetable curry
and bananas. "The Sri Aurobindo ashram is independent of these
old-fashioned concepts. We do not think of nationality or religion. We are
finding a new spirituality for the next millennium."
To my eyes, an ashram was a place where people went to learn
wisdom from a guru, a monastic retreat involving yoga, meditation, and maybe a
touch of hippyism?
"This ashram is about the virtues of work," came the
stern reply. "The Mother taught us that everybody should seek
enlightenment through work. We all have to be productive. We are not
hippies." Oops.
As well as owning large swathes of Pondicherry, the ashram also
employs half its citizens in cottage industries, producing goods ranging from
perfumes to fabrics to paper. It even runs a number of guesthouses, including
the Seaside Guest house, where I stayed: pounds 6 per night for a gigantic air-
conditioned double room in a former colonial mansion. The fact that the Sri
Aurobindo ashram is all about work does not stop people taking their holidays
there. A lot of the guest house residents are visitors from Delhi and Bombay seeking temporary
respite from their stressful lives.
As for meals - the ashram enables several thousand people to eat
three large, wholesome meals a day in the former governor's residence, paying
about 30 pence per head per day. If you are staying in an ashram guesthouse,
you can share in this absurd bargain.
But was it the French who set the people of Pondicherry on their path to
spirituality? Certainly the policemen carry bayonets, wear red kepis and are
proud of it. And India's best mineral
water is bottled here. At Le Club restaurant on the Rue Dumas - all whicker
chairs and starched tablecloths - I went for a mid-morning fruit juice and was
informed, with Parisian disdain, that drinks comprised "70 per cent juice
and 30 per cent pure, chilled Pondicherry mineral water,
Monsieur." The result was delicious.
And Pondicherry does not stop at
fruit juice. Beer is served cheaper and colder here than anywhere in India. The new town
contains off-licenses selling "genuine" Napoleon brandy. And the
rooftop restaurants serving French food are excellent. Dishes range from
approximations (the creme caramel in the Rendezvous) to the spot-on (the coq au
vin in the Satsanga).
Of course Pondicherry is not all French.
In the east of town, the traffic comprises bullocks, rickshaws, scooters and
high-slung Ambassadors, trundling along streets where advertised services range
from urology to advocacy to computer training to "shirtings and
suitings" - a typical Indian high street, in fact.
But it was hard to deny that France had done something
for the place. Tamil Nadu is not the Cote d'Azur, but Pondicherry makes more use of
the sea than all other Indian towns put together. Of an evening, for example,
romantic couples in Pondicherry come to canoodle in
the Place de la Republique. Other improbable locations in the area include the
Bazaar Saint Laurent and the Grand Hotel d'Europe, as well as the war memorial
for the "French Indians" who died for France.
Basically, the French occupied the whole seaward side of town.
Some of their old villas are now collapsing into mouldy piles of plasterwork;
others, though, have been magnificently restored, with gleaming fluted columns
and white ornamental balustrades running up to verandas overhung with banyan
trees.
In the Church of Our Lady of the Angels, I
found a troop of schoolgirl nuns and crows hopping between the neon strips.
Outside, sleepy rickshaw drivers lounged under their own awnings and a builder
with a tray of cement on his head whispered: "Bonjour, monsieur."
Or did he? It can be so hard for western visitors not to turn
imperialist in India. Pondicherry was doing things to
me the Mother may not have liked. Clearly the time had come for me to do her
bidding - and make the pilgrimage to the city that was free of nationality and
religion, Auroville itself.
That afternoon I joined a local group tour. On the bus from Pondicherry was an American
lady whose desire to come to this place had arisen after meeting a "God
Realised" woman in San Fransisco.
"Really?" asked a bearded German in sandals. "But
what do you mean exactly by God Realised?"
"That woman just had no life. She'd sleep two or three
hours, then spent the whole day, you know, giving darshen."
Indians in the group were also engaged in the task of
understanding each other.
"From which city you are hailing, sir?" a Bengali
gentleman was asking a Keralan. "The Tamils' command of Hindi is terribly
poor!" an Assamese was exclaiming.
Such multi-culturalism was perfect for a visit to the future
city of the world. On the way we had passed orchards, banana-fronde huts and
bullock carts; now in the visitor's centre we were looking down on a scale plan
of the completed city as it is designed to look some time in the next
millennium.
"The shape is of a galaxy, with cement arms lined by
corridors of greenery swirling around a hub," explained our guide.
"The four arms of the galaxy represent the industrial, international,
residential and educational areas of the city. At the hub is the Matrimandir Temple."
For those who care, Auroville does not look likely ever to be
finished. Given that its foundation stone was laid on 28 February 1968, I saw remarkably little evidence of any
construction at all. We were told that only 45 per cent of the necessary land
had so far been bought - efforts are still being made to acquire the rest.
We peered about dirt tracks, trees and lots of flowering shrubs
with names like "progress" and "psychological perfection".
A building site? Some half-constructed public buildings emerged from the trees
like Aztec ruins - the conference hall we were informed ("Can you hear the
acoustics?").
The one building in Auroville that might have been worth writing
home about was the Matrimandir Temple itself. There in
the heart of it all, the temple was approaching completion.
To reach it, we began passing checkpoints manned by Auroville
volunteers. Walk here! Stand there! Remove shoes! No bags or cameras! No
talking please! Single file!
Even without this reduction of our scraggly tour group to the
level of the Mother's school children, the first glimpse of the temple, a great
golf ball dome filling the horizon, would have been quite impressive.
Eventually, we were told, it would even be covered in fibre-glass gold- plated
disks.
Stepping inside the dome, we saw ramps flying off in all
directions above our heads, with teams of ant-like workers apparently at work.
A perfect James Bond set. We proceeded, like prisoners, along a circular spiralling
walkway that took us slowly to the top, passing signs reminding us that no
"dampness, dirt or dust" would be allowed into the innermost chamber.
And finally there it was, a momentary glimpse through a doorway
of the innermost sanctum itself, a high enclosed room of unadorned white
marble, housing nothing but a huge glass crystal, catching mystical light from
a hole in the ceiling. The heart! The key, the essence, the innermost truth -
of Auroville!
I shuddered to imagine any community at all, let alone a
"world city", basing itself around such a corny architectural
concept. Blame it all on Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, I told myself, as we
drove back to the bananas, the petals, the rickshaws, the smells, the beer and
the delightful Eurasian chaos of Pondicherry.
pondicherry fact file
Getting there and around
The author flew to India as a guest of Gulf
Air (0171-408 1717), who fly to Madras (now known as
Chennai) from London on Mondays,
Wednesdays and Fridays. The fare is pounds 481 plus around pounds 27 taxes. Pondicherry is 160 miles south
of Madras. Fly to Madras and take a prepaid
taxi, booked inside the airport, to Pondicherry. The cost will be
less than pounds 15. Otherwise, hot, crowded buses from Madras cost 50p.
For internal flights, the author used the excellent Indian
airline Jet Airways (UK reservations: 0181
970 1525). A 15-day pass for circular or same-direction routings costs $550
(pounds 338). Sample one-way fares include Bombay-Madras ($154) and
Delhi-Madras ($235).
Where to stay
The author stayed at the Seaside Guesthouse on the seafront (14 Goubert Avenue), where huge
air-conditioned doubles are available for around pounds 6. The ashram also owns
several other guesthouses in town. If you wish to dine in the ashram, tickets
covering breakfast lunch and dinner can be obtained from the guesthouse for
around 30p per day.
Visas
All British passport holders require visas in order to visit India. Contact India
House, Aldwych, London WC2B 4NA ( 0891 444544 for
recorded information, calls cost 50p/minute).
