1. Rejection of complexity, craving for certainty, defence of boundaries

The first document issued by the leaders was a letter written by Ranganath Raghavan and Raman Reddy (RRRR) after they read an article by Alan, editor of Auroville Today, about Peter Heehs, the author of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo. Alan summed up Heehs’s approach to his subject by heading the article “An extraordinarily complex individual”. Heehs did in fact try in his book to bring out Sri Aurobindo’s complexity. Reddy and Ranganath evidently preferred the simplistic portrayals they were familiar with, and set themselves up as defenders of established boundaries, crying “now he [Heehs] has crossed all limits” (RRRR).

Their alarm was shared by Alok Pandey, who wrote to the trustees that Heehs’s broadening of the field of inquiry into Sri Aurobindo will mean that “his words do not necessarily carry the same absolute authority as it [sic] did” (AP1).

Sraddhalu Ranade gave vent to the same attitude when he wrote: “Note also his [Heehs’s] glee at humanising and problematising Sri Aurobindo, as well as his need to complexify. The word problematising means ‘to propose problems’, ‘to pose problems’, ‘to make into or regard as a problem’” (SR1). Besides showing Ranade’s ignorance of English (“problematise” means to question common knowledge in order to arrive at a better understanding of a subject), this passage reveals his fear of complexity, and his reactionary turn towards an artificial certainty.

A corollary to the rejection of complexity is the reduction of reality to binary camps of good and evil, us and them. Fundamentalism proceeds by the invention of such a binary reality and its defense in the name of Truth or God. The result of this is the authorization of a partial and limited representation as the Truth, the policing of such a representation by self-proclaimed champions and the moral and secular punishment of those perceived to transgress the boundaries of this representation.