[close] Pramila Jayapala rejected her indigenous Indian culture when she was a young child, having been taught and raised in Western schools and ideology. For years, Jayapala held this uncomplicated opinion: "India repressed and backward, America creative and advanced." But after working a soulless job in investment banking and marketing, she finally came to realize that "there was a woman within me, waiting to emerge, a persona that included a complexity of new images of homeland, identity, life values, and work."

Eventually she left Seattle, Wash., where she had worked, to embark on a two-year pilgrimage through India. Japayala takes us on the underground tour--letting us see this complex and spiritually fascinating country through Western eyes but with a native guide. She openly questions the feminine and class restraints of India, yet somehow she never becomes self-righteous or didactic. Through this brave, unflinching voice we find a mentor for self-discovery as well as a model for how to know and question our own homelands. At its core this is a global manifesto in which Jayapala recognizes that spiritual growth is the only way to bring about social and political change. But at its heart this is a dynamic spiritual memoir as Jayapala continually returns to her personal journey, including the gripping crescendo--a miraculous story of her son's premature birth in Bombay. --Gail Hudson

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