Memoir, utopia and belonging in the postcolony.
Research seminar, English Literary Studies, University of Cape Town. 8 April 2021.
‘There’s a reason why so much of the best utopian literature is fiction’, writes Akash Kapur in his introduction to the 2018 anthology Auroville: Dream and Reality: ‘Utopia is by definition unreal, unattainable’ (xiii). Non-fiction accounts of utopian communities, he goes on, ‘descend quickly into sordid exposés, or memoirs of troubled childhoods’ (xiii). Yet Kapur takes up just such challenges in Better to Have Gone (2021), a layered and ambitious work of non-fiction that weaves family memoir together with a history of Auroville, an intentional community (to use the most neutral term) founded in 1968 in Tamil Nadu, southern India.
In her 2017 history of Auroville, Anu Majumdar remarks that while it has in recent years become ‘synonymous with green living, sustainable practices and environmental work’, the early decades of the community comprise ‘a far more complex and fascinating adventure’ (vii). Auroville’s spiritually guided founders envisioned it as a ‘City for the Future’, while the United Nations recognized the project early in its history as an ‘international township’. Though today’s residents seem to prefer more muted descriptions for the array of forested residential zones, small-scale farms, artistic communes and sports fields set in close proximity to local Tamil villages that long predated the settlement’s founding. ‘The community is, as we Aurovilians like to say, a living laboratory’, Kapur writes in his anthology: ‘a not-quite-yet defined experiment, an incipient society searching for new models of economy, politics, aesthetics, culture’ (Auroville: Dream and Reality xiii).
Having grown up in Auroville, Kapur finished his education in the United States and began a journalistic career there, reporting on southern India for publications like the New York Times. After a decade abroad, he and his wife Auralice Graft moved back to Tamil Nadu in 2003, then built a house and began raising a family in Auroville. As her name suggests, Auralice had also been a child of this idealistic experiment (she and the author knew each other as children), and it is on her family history that the work turns. It traces the lives and deaths of Auralice’s parents: her mother Diana Maes (‘a beautiful hippie from Belgium’ according to the back cover copy) and adoptive father John Walker (‘the handsome scion of a powerful East Coast American family’). Diane and John had met in the early 1970s, both drawn to this dream of a spiritual, counter-cultural community on an arid plateau near the coastal town of Pondicherry. ‘So how did John and Diane end up dying on the same day’, the back cover continues: ‘on a cracked concrete floor in a thatch hut by a remote canyon?’
Partly an investigation into the circumstances surrounding their deaths, and partly a history of the community, Better to Have Gone tells the stories of Auroville’s founders and their warring disciples. It evokes the ideological divisions which polarized the settlement in the 1970s: a schism between Auroville ‘pioneers’ (mainly foreigners) and the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry (mainly Indian nationals) out of which the community grew – and all of this in a region that was, until 1962, still technically part of French India. Such conflicts, Kapur’s intricately structured narrative suggests, play a role in the events leading to the death of John and Diane, a couple who place their trust in spiritual intervention rather than seeking out proper medical treatment.
For many reviewers, the book then fitted a familiar script of utopian idealism gone wrong. This ‘forensic reconstruction of two deaths set against the background of a tropical utopia’, writes William Dalrymple in his blurb, is ‘a tale of paradise lost, and of the dangers of utopian naivety’; for Vikram Chandra, it is a tale about ‘the eternal human desire for utopia, and about the dystopia that always lurks within these dreams’. Kapur, writes Neel Mukherjee, shows ‘a fine understanding of the fundamentally flawed, even cankered, nature of any utopia’.
But this, I suggest, does not capture the ambition and ambivalence of the work. What makes Kapur’s project intriguing is that it is no simple repudiation of utopianism. If anything, it is a deliberate and considered return to it, showing a desire to reinhabit and reanimate structures of feeling that are often written off as dangerous or discredited. In an early passage, the author quotes E. M. Cioran to make the case for certain forms of social dreaming: ‘We act only under the fascination of the impossible’. Kapur goes on: ‘I want to stay with the dream for now. I want to follow its potential and see how long I can hold on to it; and see, too, if I can rescue it from what comes later’.
Work in progress…