Auroville, a place where the need of spirit and care for progress overpowers the satisfaction of pleasure and material enjoyments, is celebrating its Golden Jubilee year. Prime Minister Narendra Modi attended on February 25, 2018 the Golden Jubilee celebrations of Auroville Foundation in Viluppuram, Tamil Nadu and highlighted how Sri Aurobindo contributed towards good of the nation and humanity. Modi said that Sri Aurobindo’s vision of India’s spiritual leadership continues to inspire us, even today. Indeed, Auroville is a manifestation of that vision. Over the last five decades, it has emerged as a hub of social, cultural, educational, economic and spiritual innovation.
Auroville was founded in 1968 by Mirra Alfassa (born Blanche Rachel Mirra Alfassa), known to her followers as The Mother, who was the spiritual partner of Aurobindo, philosopher, yogi, guru and a leader of the independence movement. Auroville’s inauguration ceremony attended by over 5,000 people from across the world was held on Wednesday 28 February 1968. Earth from 114 countries was poured into an urn in the amphitheatre and the charter was read in several languages of the world. The Mother read from The Auroville Charter, hand-written in French by the Divine Mother herself, and the city of the future was born. The charter said:
- Auroville belongs to nobody in particular. Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole. But to live in Auroville one must be a willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness.
- Auroville will be the place of an unending education, of constant progress, a youth that never ages.
- Auroville wants to be the bridge between the past and the future. Taking advantage of all discoveries from without and from within, Auroville will boldly spring towards future realisations.
- Auroville will be a site of material and spiritual researches for a living embodiment of an actual Human Unity.
Auroville, to be necessarily artistic with an emphasis on beauty; was planned as a unified, self-sustaining town, ideas that are now in vogue. It was planned with overlapping, multi-use zones, with solar energy and non-polluting, non-motorised traffic. It balanced high and low density areas to integrate green zones in city spaces.
- Auroville has several designations to live up to: the City of Universal Culture, City of the Future, City of Dawn, City beneath a Banyan tree, City at the Service of Truth, City the Earth Needs.
- Auroville is an experimental township in in Viluppuram District spread across Tamil Nadu and Puducherry in southern India, approximately 150 km south of Chennai and 10 km north of the town of Puducherry.
- Auroville was designed by architect Roger Anger.
- Auroville was intended to be a universal town where men and women of all countries are able to live in peace and progressive harmony, above all creeds, all politics and all nationalities.
- Auroville’s purpose of was to realize human unity.
- Matrimandir, the soul of Auroville, a building for the invisible, is its focal point, spherical temple covered in Gold Discs.
- Bharat Nivas, Pavilion of India, is in Auroville’s International Zone
- Auroville Botanical Gardens protects the region’s tropical dry evergreen forest.
- Auroville Beach is a long sandy stretch with gentle surf.
- Alternative farms with wholly organic systems were established.
- Environment and sustainability is the focus, which fine-tuned with collective awareness and attitudes.
- Research and projects initiated in earth, wind, solar and water technologies.
- Auroville’s Education offers hybrid possibilities between experimental and standard education, community experiments and extracurricular activities.
The Mother had then said, “Earth needs a place where men can live away from all national rivalries, social conventions, and self-contradictory moralities and contending religions; a place where human beings, freed from all slavery to the past, can devote themselves wholly to the discovery and practice of the Divine Consciousness that is seeking to manifest. Auroville wants to be this place.”
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