Intentional Communities in India

India's ancient and enduring civilization has always been marked by a strong sense of community. Over 70 percent of India's population live in traditional communities—villages or small neighborhoods. Other social structures that have evolved in India, such as the caste system, the joint-family system, and tribal orders, also nurture bonding and shared living. Indians are gregarious, and basic community values—sharing and caring for others' welfare—are still an important part of Indian society.

Sociologists claim that disintegration of traditional communities is inevitable as a nation evolves from an agricultural society to an industrialized society. With [Page 724]increasing industrialization and urbanization, modern India is indeed subject to the fragmentation of the jointfamily system and the growth of the nuclear family model. Yet, tradition ensures that ties to the extended family are still maintained. Also, given the acute short-age of land per capita, suburban development is not widespread in India, in contrast to North America. Some sense of community is thus imposed upon urban Indians, who often have to share close living spaces.

Such social, cultural, and developmental differences account for the fact that the notion of intentional communities in India greatly differs from that of the West. Intentional communities are widely viewed as a Western, if not a North American, phenomenon. The very term intentional communities, as Dan Questenberry, member of the Fellowship for Intentional Community, points out, is of American origin. In North America, urbanization, industrialization, and suburban development led to the breaking up of extended family ties and the dissolution of the traditional neighborhood. Consequently, in reaction to the isolation of the nuclear family, more and more people start living together to bring back a sense of community to their lives. As Kathy Moody of Laurel Hill Plantation (an intentional community in the United States that folded in 1995) says, “Communities [in North America] are replacements for extended families for people who have lost touch with their biological extended families” (FIC 1995, p. 37).

In India however, there are other reasons why people choose to move from their traditional communities and form intentional communities. Strictly speaking, although the experiments in shared living described in this entry can be broadly categorized as communities, the term intentional communities is not common parlance in India.