Better to Have Gone: Love, Death, and the Quest for Utopia in Auroville

by Akash Kapur

One of the first officially recognized victims of China’s Cultural Revolution was a teacher. On August 5, 1966, a group of tenth graders at the Beijing Normal University Girls High School, in the heart of the Chinese capital, began violently attacking their instructors. They were responding to demands by the Party leadership for a “thorough criticism of academia, educators, journalists, artists, publishers, and other representatives of the capitalist class.” The students seized a group of five teachers, sprayed ink on them, hung boards marked with red X’s on their necks, threw boiling water over them, and hit them using nail-spiked clubs. They accused the teachers of being “counterrevolutionary revisionists.” After