AUROVILLE, India — The bulldozer arrived one evening in December, shaking Ganga Park awake in her tree home and sending her scurrying down the trunk.
When its operator paused the menacing machine, which was there to clear a path by way of the encompassing forest, Ms. Park clung to it. Their standoff continued till the motive force gave up and turned again.
When the bulldozer returned just a few days later, Ms. Park confronted it once more, however this time she was joined by dozens of her neighbors within the south Indian arcadia of Auroville.
They linked arms across the bulldozer, chanting “Om Namo Bhagavate,” a preferred Hindu mantra that roughly interprets to “Obeisance to the Almighty.” They remained till they received a minimum of a short lived victory: a keep order from an environmental tribunal, forcing the demolition work to cease.
“It was tremendous instinctive,” Ms. Park, 20, mentioned of her leap into motion. “If there’s an intruder, you instantly defend and defend.”
The intruder, on this case, was the federal government of Auroville, an idealistic group based in 1968 with the aim of realizing human unity by placing the divine on the heart of all issues.
That unity, nevertheless, has not too long ago frayed.
A bitter dispute has arisen between Auroville’s authorities, which has revived a long-delayed plan to vastly develop the group, and people residents who wish to defend the thriving forest they’ve cultivated from the barren stretch of land the place their social experiment started greater than 50 years in the past.
The group was based by a French author, Mirra Alfassa, higher recognized to her followers merely because the Mom, who believed {that a} change of consciousness and aspiration to the divine in Auroville would ripple out to the remainder of the world.
Earlier than her dying in 1973, the Mom had commissioned the French architect Roger Anger to develop a design for a metropolis of fifty,000, about 15 occasions the present inhabitants. Mr. Anger conceived of a galactic kind: spiraling concentric circles across the Matrimandir — a round golden meditation chamber — with 12 radial roads.
However with out the cash or manpower over the many years to hold out the plan, the group’s residents, or Aurovilians, constructed one thing completely different.
They dug wells and constructed thatched-roof huts. And so they planted bushes. Lots of them. Underneath the cool forest cover, civets, jackals, peacocks and different creatures roam, and muriel bushes launch a candy, heady perfume.
The divide between these Aurovilians who wish to comply with the Mom’s city improvement plans — referred to as constructivists — and people who wish to let the group proceed creating by itself — organicists — has lengthy existed.
However the wrestle took on a heightened pitch final July, when the workplace of Prime Minister Narendra Modi appointed a brand new secretary, Jayanti Ravi, to go the township’s governing board.
Ms. Ravi had been the well being secretary in Gujarat, Mr. Modi’s dwelling state. Earlier, she was a district Justice of the Peace below Mr. Modi, then the state’s prime official, when he confronted near-universal condemnation for failing to manage two months of non secular riots in Gujarat in 2002 that left greater than 1,000 folks, largely Muslim, lifeless.
The federal government’s new curiosity in enacting Mr. Anger’s design displays Mr. Modi’s penchant for formidable building initiatives to foster tourism round Hindu or nationalist websites. His Bharatiya Janata Get together, or B.J.P., is the political arm of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a social group devoted to creating India an explicitly Hindu state.
Although Auroville was based by a Frenchwoman, she was the disciple of Sri Aurobindo, a religious instructor and a freedom fighter for India’s independence. The deliberate redesign of Auroville is being completed forward of Sri Aurobindo’s a hundred and fiftieth delivery anniversary in August — for which Mr. Modi is planning an enormous celebration.
“A part of Narendra Modi’s agenda is to acceptable all spiritual and religious figures into the fold of the B.J.P.,” mentioned Navroz Mody, the resident who filed the petition to pause the event challenge.
Ms. Ravi promised to infuse the challenge with tens of millions of {dollars} in federal funding. The event would begin by paving a wonderfully round highway, a part of a broader, pedestrianized beltway that might join Auroville’s 4 distinct zones. However in the way in which stand Auroville’s youth heart, a water catchment space and lots of of bushes.
Sindhuja Jagadeesh, a spokeswoman for the native authorities, mentioned it was a form of “decadence” for Auroville’s roughly 3,300 folks — about half Indian, and half foreigners — to dwell on 3,000 acres of land in a rustic as densely populated as India.
“Many individuals have turn into hooked up to their consolation within the greenery, however we’re purported to experiment and evolve,” mentioned Ms. Jagadeesh, who can also be an architect and an Aurovilian.
The stance of these against the event, Ms. Jagadeesh added, clashes sharply with the Mom’s imaginative and prescient for a mannequin metropolis of the long run that might be replicated around the globe.
“We’re right here for human unity, but in addition to construct a metropolis,” she mentioned.
The proponents of the event plan, which finally envisions a high-density, self-sustained metropolis with a bustling economic system and experimental structure, deride the Auroville of right now as an eco-village the place a customer can get an excellent cappuccino however not the change in consciousness its founder hoped for.
“It’s not only a metropolis plan, it’s meant to carry an experiment,” mentioned Shrimoyi Rosegger, a resident who approves of the event and has a deep religion within the transformative energy of the Mom’s plan. “We imagine it’s an intelligence which is past us,” she added, “that if we comply with her pointers, one thing will probably be revealed to us.”
Leaning in opposition to a bike outdoors the group’s free clothes retailer and meals co-op, Auroson Bystrom, 51, among the many first youngsters born in Auroville, mentioned he opposes Ms. Ravi’s plans, however thinks the extreme debate has energized the group.
“Aurobindo is all about evolution,” Mr. Bystrom mentioned, referring to Sri Aurobindo. “And for the final 35 years, Auroville hasn’t felt all that evolutionary.”
Some opponents of the plan say that the philosophy of Sri Aurobindo and the Mom was not as a lot about constructing a brand new metropolis because it was constructing a brand new human. And that takes time.
“How we urbanize is extra vital than how briskly we urbanize,” mentioned Suhasini Ayer, an architect whose mixed-use improvement in Auroville not too long ago received a design award on the U.N. local weather convention in Glasgow.
The group’s small inhabitants, opponents of the event say, owes extra to the bizarre circumstances for residency than to the shortage of the ring highway that the federal government desires to plow by way of bushes.
These wishing to dwell right here should bear a 12 months of vetting — and should make investments their very own cash into properties that can stay city property.
Auroville receives some funding from the federal government, however drums up most of its funds internally, from non-public enterprise and donations.
Residents purify their very own water, develop their very own grains and make their very own paper. Those that work for Auroville’s public companies obtain a meager wage referred to as “upkeep.”
“These folks wish to be pragmatic,” Renu Neogy, a lifelong Aurovilian, mentioned of Ms. Ravi and her supporters. “However this isn’t a practical place, that is utopia.”
Some international residents mentioned they feared that Ms. Ravi might deprive them of the sponsorship they should proceed residing in India in the event that they fail to get on board along with her plans.
Whereas the 2 sides appear far aside, some residents imagine an answer might lie within the strategy to group decision-making that was a founding precept of Auroville: consensus constructing.
Allan Bennett, an Auroville city planner, mentioned a bunch of the group’s architects had been mulling easy methods to meld collectively the place that the Mom envisioned with the place that exists right now by way of a course of referred to as dream weaving.
“The architects are attempting to seize the poetry of the galaxy imaginative and prescient and likewise the bottom actuality,” he mentioned. “These are the ideas they should weave collectively.”
Again in her treehouse, stuffed with fowl music and daylight, Ms. Park contemplated what she had confronted a bulldozer to save lots of.
Rising up in Auroville, Ms. Park picked lemons and swung on the limbs of banyan bushes. When she went briefly to dwell in Seoul, she wore a college uniform and adopted a strict routine.
“Outdoors it’s unavoidable to purchase trash, to get swept away by consumerism. It actually will get you down,” she mentioned. “It’s simple to be an excellent human being right here.”