Writer and editor Kate James guest blogs the story behind her new travel book chronicling her trip to modern day India - When Gods Collide: An Unbeliever's Pilgrimage Along India's Coromandel Coast.

I had been thinking about Graham Staines for ten years.

Graham was an Australian who moved to India in 1965 to work on a leprosy mission, and was killed there in 1999, burned alive in his car along with his two little boys by what was described as a 'fundamentalist Hindu mob'.

The deaths shook me hard. My family were also Australian Christians who had lived in India – I was seven when we left Australia and fifteen when we came back to what my parents called home. I hadn't known Graham, but I had met his wife and his older children, who attended the same boarding school where I had lived, in the hill town of Ooty.

I grieved for the family, and identified with them. But the grief was complicated by the fact that at the time of the deaths, I was pretty sure I no longer believed what Graham had believed. I was a secret atheist in a community of Christians. And the reports of Hindu fundamentalism confused me: as far as I could tell, Hinduism was the most tolerant and syncretistic of faiths.

Here I am relaxing with family and friends in south India, 1980

I ended up admitting I was a nonbeliever soon after Graham Staines died. I went to work for Lonely Planet as an editor, and later as a writer, and wrote my first book after travelling to China in the footsteps of English missionary women from the turn of the last century.

I was interested in the form of travel writing, in the clichés and assumptions that Western writers bring to books about places they see as exotic and 'other'. As a writer I wanted to question some of these ideas, to try to do it differently.

Travel-author cliché no.1: pose clumsily with local wildlife

Finally, I decided I'd better write my own Indian travel book; it was a place that has been so familiar to me, but I knew I didn't really know it well. I'd travel and talk to people of different faiths, and people with no faith. At the same time I would follow up the story of Graham Staines. Why had he died? If I no longer agreed with his reasons for being in India, could I still believe he had been a good man, doing worthwhile things?

I took the trip in 2009, and in between editing travel guides I spent the next couple of years weaving together the stories of my childhood, Graham Staines' life, and what I could see of modern India. The book is about all these things, and more.

When Gods Collide is out now in paperback ($24.95) and ebook ($11.99).

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