Addendum to Newsletter 33 – September 2026​

Addendum to Newsletter 33 – September 2026 We want to share with you also an email from one of the Auroville residents that was sent on 6 September to the Office of the Secretary, Auroville Foundation and others copied in the 5 September email. It was posted on the Auroville Intranet also. In our view, it raises some valid points. From: Manoj Pavitran Date: Sun, Sep 6, 2026 at 3:45 PM Subject: Annapurna: Ten Days, and Forty Years    I write this as one individual. I hold no office, I speak for no group, and I am not interested in adding to the noise. But some things ask to be said plainly, and this is one of them. On 5 September, the residents of Annapurna Farm received a communication giving them ten days to vacate their homes and begin moving their livestock and farm operations. The letter describes the timeline as final and non-negotiable. I want to leave aside, for a moment, the question of who has the authority to decide what. That question is being fought over in several rooms and several courts, and I have nothing useful to add to it. I want to ask a different question, which I think is the one Sri Aurobindo and the Mother would have us ask first: what consciousness is this decision coming from, and what consciousness do we meet it with? What cannot be relocated The letter speaks of relocating farming activities. Anyone who has worked land knows what that phrase conceals. You can move a tractor. You can move a granary, at cost. You cannot move soil. Forty years of building organic matter, of feeding a soil biology that took decades to establish, of learning where the water sits and which plot forgives a late monsoon. You cannot move a mango tree that fruits, or a windbreak that took twenty years to close. Organic certification attaches to the history of a plot, not to the people farming it. On new ground, all of this begins again at zero. The Mother wrote in To Be a True Aurovilian: Work, even manual work, is something indispensable for the inner discovery. If one does not work, if one does not put his consciousness into matter, the latter will never develop.(1970; CWM Vol. 13, pp. 213-14) That is not a metaphor. It is a description of what a farm is. Annapurna is forty years of consciousness put into matter. The matter developed because the consciousness was put there, patiently, unpaid, by people who could have done almost anything else with their lives. To ask that this be undone in ten days is not a scheduling decision. It is a statement about what we believe that work was worth. And there is the irony we should not look away from: the land is being taken for a campus dedicated to sustainability. The manner of the asking Now I want to say something about the shape of the communication itself, because I think it tells us more than its paragraphs do. The letter records that the meeting with the residents was attended by a Visa Consultant. The email was copied to the Admissions and Terminations Scrutinising Committee. Consider what these two have to do with the matter at hand. A visa consultant has no function in moving cattle. A terminations committee has no function in dismantling a granary. Neither one knows anything about soil, herds, monsoon timing or the logistics of an itemised relocation plan, and neither was asked to. What they do have a function in is whether a person may continue to live in Auroville, and whether a person may continue to live in India. The prose of that letter speaks of goodwill, of an orderly and mutually workable conclusion, of a final opportunity offered in the interests of all. The attendance and the distribution list speak about something else. They speak to people who know exactly what those two bodies do. I would be glad to be wrong about this, and I say so sincerely. If there is a reason connected to farming or housing why a visa consultant and a terminations committee belong in a discussion about livestock and granaries, I would genuinely like to hear it, and I would withdraw the observation. But if there is no such reason, then we should name what we are looking at. A decision that is confident of its own rightness does not need to place those bodies in the room. It can afford to persuade. When an authority stops trying to persuade and begins instead to make the cost of disagreement personal, something has changed in the nature of that authority, and the change is a loss for the one exercising it as much as for the one receiving it. A body that must persuade is obliged to understand. A body that can reach a person’s residency is obliged to understand nothing. The Mother, speaking of how Aurovilians should conduct themselves with the people of the surrounding villages, said something that is not confined to that context: The sense of superiority in dealing with them must not be there. If the Divine took an attitude of superiority, men would be crushed in a minute.(22 October 1971, answers to questions from Varadharajan) The Divine has all the power there is and does not use it that way. That is the measure. It is a high one, and none of us meets it. But it is the measure we accepted when we came here. Whose land is it Here I want to be careful, because the honest answer cuts in every direction. Auroville belongs to nobody in particular. Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole. But to live in Auroville one must be the willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness.(The Auroville Charter, 28 February 1968) Annapurna does not belong to its stewards. It does not belong to the Foundation, or to the Governing Board, or to the Residents’ Assembly, or to IIT Madras. Every one