I grew up playing tennis on red clay in the South Indian countryside. I was a child in Auroville, an intentional community located on a barren plateau some 100 miles south of Madras (now Chennai). The community was small, a mere 300 people or so, and life there was spartan: thatch huts, many without electricity or running water, all situated on a desert landscape that felt very cut off from the world, both geographically and psychologically.
Yet from its earliest days, the community had tennis courts: not one, but several, meticulously watered every day with hosepipes, their lines hand-painted with a concoction of white lime and water mixed in rusty metal buckets. It helped that the surrounding earth was naturally red, colored by iron oxide in the soil; at least the earth for the courts didn’t have to be imported. But still, it always struck me as odd that my community, otherwise so harsh and undeveloped, had something of a thriving tennis culture. What accounted for the apparent incongruity?
The answer, I later understood, had to do with a Frenchwoman named Blanche Rachel Mirra Alfassa. Born in Paris in 1878, Alfassa (known to everyone in Auroville as the Mother) moved to the nearby town of Pondicherry, at that time a French colony, in the early 20th century. In collaboration with the Indian mystic and former freedom fighter Aurobindo Ghose, she built an ashram, or spiritual retreat, that ultimately grew into one of the largest such settlements in India. Auroville, my hometown, was an offshoot of the ashram, an intentional project intended as a laboratory to manifest the teachings of Sri Aurobindo (as he was known) and the Mother.