Home, Again!

"Home, Again!" narrates a story--against the backdrop of events in Europe and India during 1928 to 1966--of a European mother and her Indo-european son and their quest for understanding who they are. Angela Guttenberg, a twenty-two year old Austrian woman, graduates in anthropology from the University of Vienna in 1933. Disenchanted with Europe because of Hitler's rise, as well as her lover's conversion to Nazism, she sails to India for her post-graduate research. and she goes to Jejuri, a temple town famous for its sun-god Khandoba, and "Dhangar Samaj," a nomadic community of shepherds, who are his worshippers. While researching the Dhangar culture, she falls in love with a Dhangar man by whom she conceives a son. When her son, Haldiram Johann Holkar, a self-described mongrel child with a hybrid name, grows up, he goes for higher education to England where, in the early 1960s, he sees the ugliness of British racism, as well as the glory of British liberalism. Upon his return to India, he begins to see the inadequacies of his people. and driven by his own modern vision for India, he confronts the religious extremists on a day of communal tension in the Bombay of 1966--only to be killed by them. At the end, Angela Guttenberg-Holkar, now middle-aged at fifty-five, returns to Vienna as she had gone to India--disenchanted with political life, struggling with her identity. the story progresses primarily through narratives and dialogues and, occasionally, through exchanges of letters, moving from one landscape to the other--from Vienna to Jejuri, then back to Europe, finally back to India--and explores the fascinating struggle of the two individuals, the mother and the son, to define who they are in a world in which different cultures meet to produce complicated identities.