Holy Warriors, by Edna Fernandes

Sixty years have passed since India's independence, when a hastily conceived partition left a million dead on the new frontier. Edna Fernandes marks the occasion with a portrait of the country from its fundamentalist fringes: Muslim, Sikh, Christian and Hindu. Each of them provides eager martyrs but none honestly addresses the question of the day: what is India?

Changes are "inevitable and irreversible" for India, writes Fernandes. Yet the country is not yet reconciled with a "painful past", with its last era of greatness only three or four centuries ago, under Muslim rule. Here's the rub for the Shiv Sena party chief, Bal Thackeray, who rejects the term "India": "If we live in Hindustan, we are Hindus." Shiv Sena and the radical groups behind India's former governing party, the BJP, believe in Hindutva: an ideological merger of Holyland with Fatherland. For these admirers of Nazism, the pain is a millennium of external conquest. For Thackeray, "India" signifies Nehru's vision of a secular state enriched by diversity.

Fernandes is British, her parents Catholic Goans, her ancestors Hindu Kshatriyas. Since 2001, she has been a journalist in Delhi, a knowing "foreigner" in mythic "Hindustan". Holy Warriors begins with Islam in Old Delhi, Kashmir and Deoband. In Goa, she revisits the Catholic Inquisition and resistance to it, before meeting Christian Baptist separatists in Nagaland. Her third journey looks into Sikh separatism, and finally she turns to Hindu nationalists in the cities and Ayodhya.

Fernandes enters inner sanctums but also listens to ordinary people. She finds alienation and resentment among Muslims, Nagas and Punjabis. Least resonant is her take on Islamic India, perhaps because its heart lies in the syncretism of Indian Sufism. The Nagas are a genetically and culturally distinct people, but she rightly prescribes greater autonomy within the Indian Union as their only possible future. Her account of the rise and brutal oppression of Sikh militancy stands out. Common to each plight is a brutal state apparatus, large numbers of "disappeared", and the aggression of the Hindutva contingent.

Fernandes reports on India's differences with compelling insight. The problem is Hindutva's arrival on the national stage as a rival to the portmanteau notion of a secular India: a retroactive bloodstained fantasy challenging the foundation of modernity. Holy Warriors makes for vital reading, showing India's urgent need to rearticulate an inclusive identity, to master change and exceed past glories.

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