At the best of times, there is an uneasy calm in Hindu-Muslim relations in the country. The present is a very fragile period made even more turbulent by Murli Manohar Joshi's efforts to rewrite history textbooks. Thus, when there is a contribution to furthering a deeper understanding of our composite heritage, it is to be welcomed. Beyond Turk and Hindu, edited by David Gilmartin, a noted historian, and Bruce Lawrence, an eminent scholar of religions, and published recently by the University of Florida Press, falls into this category. In this fascinating and wide-ranging volume, 13 distinguished scholars challenge the popular presumption that Hindus and Muslims are irreconcilably different groups, inevitably clashing with each other.

Tony Stewart, who teaches at the North Carolina State University, writes about the little known Satya Pir who has immense following among Hindus and Muslims in West Bengal, Orissa and Bangladesh. His very name embodies his appeal to both religious traditions as an avatar of Vishnu and as a Sufi saint. Christopher Shackle of the University of London explores romantic poetry from the Punjab and demonstrates that religious divisions get transcended as epitomised in Bulle Shah's famous lines: "Neither Arab am I nor man of Lahore, nor Indian from the town of Nagaur, neither Hindu am I nor Turk of Peshawar."

Moving on to Tamil Nadu, where Muslims pride themselves on being among the oldest Islamic communities in the world, Vasudha Narayanan, a professor of religions at the University of Florida, focuses on Cirappuranam, a 17th century poem in praise of the Prophet composed by Umaru Pulavar. The poem positions Mohammed simultaneously in the wider world of Islam and in the world of India. Most Indians do not know that eminent Muslim scholars have written on Kamban's Ramayana. Narayanan rightly draws attention to M.M. Ismail, a former chief justice of the Madras High Court who has authored over 40 books on the Ramayana. One of the most moving passages in Narayanan's article is the one where she quotes a song from a Tamil cassette that goes thus: "India is our motherland; Islam is our way of life; only Tamil is our language."

Literary texts are not the only markers available to scholars to debunk the modern notion of clearly bounded Hindu and Muslim identities. Carl Ernst, a professor of religion at the University of North Carolina, examines how Indo-Muslim authors have written about the famous Ellora temples near Aurangabad. Ernst writes that attempts to describe Muslims as essentially prone to idol smashing are confounded by historical records, which indicate that Muslims who wrote about idol temples had complex reactions based as much on aesthetic and political considerations as on religion. Even Aurangzeb was a great admirer of Ellora and lies buried just a few miles down the road from the temples.

Richard Eaton, who teaches at the University of Arizona and is best known for his brilliantly innovative The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, analyses the question of temple desecration in Indo-Muslim states. Nobody has carried out such a meticulous investigation as Eaton has. Between 1192 and 1729, he concludes, there were 80 instances of temple desecration whose historicity appears reasonably certain, a figure completely different from the 60,000 peddled by the RSS and its cohorts.

Moreover, temple destruction was more a political and military act and had less to do with religious fanaticism. A point conveniently ignored by the RSS but brought up by Eaton is that Hindu rulers in the pre-Islamic period also destroyed places of worship owing allegiance to their rivals. Philip Wagoner, a professor at Wesleyan University, turns conventional wisdom about the Vijayanagar kingdom on its head and points out that its rulers saw themselves not so much as "saviours of the south" but as "sultans among Indian kings". Nothing else can explain the widespread use of Islamicate elements in Vijayanagar culture.

There are other seminal pieces like Stewart Gordon's discussion of Maratha patronage of Muslim institutions in Burhanpur and Khandesh, Muzaffar Alam's explanation of the relationship between the Shari'a and governance in the Indo-Islamic context and Catherine Asher's reconstruction of religious identities through the architecture of Shahjahanabad and Jaipur. The theme running through this extraordinary collection is the interplay and overlap between the larger Islamicate and specific Indic world views, rather than the Hindu-Muslim conflict, a perspective that has come to be deeply embedded in our thinking. We do not have to deny the presence of antagonism to derive inspiration from the enormous degree of syncretism that characterises Indian civilisation. Illuminating our past as has been done in Beyond Turk and Hindu does show the way to the future.

(The author is with the Congress party. These are his personal views)