This book arose out of an attempt to resolve a range of paradoxes in the religious and social life of southern India. Even the most casual visitor knows that the south Indian worshipper inhabits a world of spectacular colour and vitality. In every city and every village, shrines abound and elaborate rituals are an everyday occurrence. Most striking of all is the fact that in the Tamil and Malayalam-speaking regions of south India, powerful and dynamic variants of the three major ‘world religions’– Hinduism, Islam and Christianity – have grown, developed and overlapped, all within the comparatively recent historical past, and all within a setting of remarkably rapid social and political change.

The result, much commented upon by early travellers and still apparent today, is a society in which warlike Muslim and Christian saints and indigenous divinities of blood and power came to be revered and worshipped by professing Christians, Muslims and Hindus. Everywhere in the south, ‘people of the Book’, self-professed adherents of the socalled convert religions, join their Hindu neighbours in ceremonial chariot processions modelled on those of the region's great Siva and Vishnu temples. In the region's pre-colonial states and kingdoms, Hindu and Muslim rulers stood as sponsors to the shrines and ceremonies of Christian Virgins and indigenous Tamil and Malayali warrior goddesses; men of every origin and affiliation still fight fiercely over flags, banners and other tokens of ceremonial ‘honour’ and precedence, and cults of vegetarian abstinence flourish in close association with ferocious rites of blood-letting and supernaturally inspired ritual head-severing.