The hours before I start my fieldwork

by Isa Prieto –

I arrive at Chennai airport at 1 am. As soon as I step outside the airport, the humid air envelops me, and I immediately sweat. My mother, Renu, is waiting for me outside, I haven’t seen her in more than one year. I hug her tightly. She always feels smaller than I remember. Maybe because in my mind, she is huge. In the past 2 years, I have seen her laugh off death threats, wrestle a grown man, and stand in front of hundreds of people denouncing government officials that could get her deported or jailed. These events are all part of why I have flown back to India to research the resistance movement in our hometown. When the taxi pulls up, we are already gossiping about Auroville’s ongoing conflict.

Auroville is the intentional community where I grew up in South India. Since December 2021, it has been plagued by attempts from a small yet effective group of Indian Government officials to appropriate administrative control and assets of the community. This little community of 3000 people is known for its spiritual underpinnings as an experiment in Human Unity and its successful reforestation efforts. In response to this conflict, a “ragtag” resistance movement (that quickly learned to go underground) mobilized overnight to resist the administrative “takeover”. Both my mother and I have been involved in this movement since the conflict started 3 years ago. It has been a steep learning curve for all of us; gathering a legal team to fight battles in courts, establishing a media strategy and presence, and initiating community engagement processes.

I left Auroville to study Anthropology at the VU particularly to document these historical events in my community. I wanted to know what kept people, like my wily mother, resilient in the face of conflict, and how their spiritual ideals influenced their resistance work. This question led me to take the profound and messy plunge into the world of engaged research.

The field was my home, I was at home in the field. This amalgam site of field-home was revealed to be more than a sum of its parts. I was not a researcher trying to adopt an insider perspective, neither was I just an Aurovilian anymore! The roles of Aurovilian, researcher, and activist pulled me in different directions, offering insightful and trusted access but also complicating my relationship with academia, research, and my community. Was it possible to present an analysis that was useful to both Auroville and the university? Could I do that without betraying one or the other?

I mull over these questions apprehensively as the taxi swerves between cows huddled together on the warm tar road. Halfway through our three-hour drive back from the airport, we stop to get some strong and sugary chai. As Renu recounts the stories of the recent news of the take-over in matter-of-fact tone I ask “How in the world do you have hope in the face of this?”. She pauses, holding the cup of tea to her lips. “A deep, deep faith lives inside of me, and it keeps me going. You know, the line from that poem by Claude Nougaro comes to me. “La foi est plus belle que Dieu”. Faith is more beautiful than God.”

My mother aptly provided me with the key to what will unlock the forthcoming three months of fieldwork for me. The answer to the question of how this resistance movement is resilient lies in the profound commitment to the spiritual ideals of Auroville – human unity, the evolution of consciousness, and seeing every challenge as an opportunity to put spirituality into practice. They are doing activism in a spiritual way – a spiritual activism. And it keeps them afloat, the activists, the movement, and ultimately the community.

My mother lies down on my lap and falls asleep. In the back seat, now alone with my thoughts, I take in the early hours of India. I roll down the window to the smells of the recently rained on earth. As we turn off the highway and into the dirt roads of Auroville, my excitement grows. We are almost home. Thorn bushes and vines are bursting with life, rained on from the winter monsoon. They are dripping, heavy with dew. Mist is suspended on the long winding road home through the forest. Finally, we turn the corner to my home and the house emerges from the dark. The dogs bark to greet us.

Inside, Mama drags her feet upstairs to bed right away. I lie on the couch with the dogs sleeping on either side of my body. I am too excited to sleep. Instead, I listen. There are the birds and the crickets, the sounds of the forest that make me tingle with delight. And then at 5 am, right as the dawn breaks, a call, crackling over a loudspeaker, is heard. It drifts over the trees from our neighbors 3 kilometers to the east. This sound awakens something inside of me. It is the adhan, the Muslim call to prayer. It brings silence into my body. I close my eyes and take a long deep breath. This sacred sound I heard every day my whole childhood. How could I have forgotten that this was coming? I missed it deeply, achingly. The world has begun to wake up. An audible, visible sign of spirituality. A recognition of faith. A reminder for my own as well. I close my eyes. Today, I tell myself, today I will start fieldwork.

Isa Prieto is a Master’s student Social and Cultural Anthropology