Home Again!

<p>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.</p><p>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 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. </p><p>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 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.</p><p>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—as the mother and the son strive to define who they are in a world in which diverse cultures meet to produce complicated identities.</p>