An ode to the future supermen: understanding the spiritual experiment at Auroville

Abstract

Societies are always gathered around a particular object or an idea that serves as its totem and its driving principle. This conscious arrangement of society, especially around an ideal, has been termed in history as utopias, which consciously moulds an individual's behaviour inhabiting it for the desired future goal. However, in the hyper-humanistic period, called by James Scott as High-modernism, we can see a drastic truncation in the scope and range of those desired future forms, limited only to economic and material wellbeing. The aim of this paper therefore is to look into an example of the utopian experiment that substantially differs from a high-modernist worldview. The paper will analyse one such futuristic spiritual experiment at Auroville and try to trace its similarities as well as its difference from the hyper-humanistic ideals of modernity.