Home, Again!

A Novel of Identity, Self-Discovery, and Tragedy

Home, Again! narrates the story of a European mother and her Indo-European son, who are struggling to understand who they are, against the backdrop of events in Europe and India. Angela Guttenberg, a twenty-two-year-old Austrian woman, graduates in anthropology from the University of Vienna in 1933. Disenchanted with Europe because of Hitlers rise, as well as her lovers conversion to Nazism, she sails to India for her post-graduate research. And she goes to Jejuri, a temple town in the Deccan famous for the folk culture of the sun-god, Khandoba, as well as for the concentration of the Dhangar Samaj, a nomadic community of shepherds, who are his worshippers. While researching the Dhangar culture, she falls in love with a Dhangar with whom she has a son. When her son, Haldiram Johann Holkar, a self-described mongrel child with a hybrid name, grows up, he goes to England for higher education. There, 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 religious extremists on a day of communal tension in the Bombay of 1966only 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 Indiadisenchanted 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 otherfrom Vienna to Jejuri, then back to Europe, finally back to Indiaas the mother and the son strive to define who they are in a world in which diverse cultures meet to produce complicated identities.