This is a tale of land-grab and intrigue, a battle of politics and religion being fought by Catholic nuns, priests and Hindu fundamentalists among a people whose culture goes back to the beginning of time.
And it is a tale of modern India, where hardliners from the Hindu majority are determined to check the power of minority religions -- nowhere more so than in the remote homelands of the country's animistic tribals, the so-called Adivasis.
It started when the Carmelite Sisters of Charity, who are now sharing school premises with Jesuit priests in Subir in western India, decided they really ought to have a place of their own to live, educate their girls and run a health clinic.
They found a nice plot of land nearby, donated by a rich widow. But just when the paperwork was all but completed, the land was taken over by a Hindu group, who the nuns say persuaded the widow's stepson to donate the land to them instead.
And now a Hindu health clinic is being built on the very spot where the Christian school and clinic was supposed to be.
"Why here? We were the ones who started first," says Sister Liza. "There are so many other villages."
The nuns are convinced this was one more attempt to harrass them by a collection of hardline groups which include India's ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
And it had all the more resonance since it was played out in western Gujarat state, where the BJP is fighting for re-election in a state poll due on December 12 on a hardline Hindu ticket.
The BJP's aim, say analysts, is to win votes by uniting the majority Hindus against minorities -- usually Muslims following communal violence early this year in Gujarat in which 1,000 died.
But in the southern Gujarat heartland of the tribals, who make up 15 percent of the population and who traditionally vote for the opposition Congress, Christians are the target.
Many Hindu fundamentalists accuse church-funded groups of proselytisation, especially in tribal areas. The hardliners claim the tribals are Hindus and the religion is in danger from Christians. "To keep the Hindu bloc united, you have to construct an enemy, but there are no tribal Muslims, so they constructed the Christian as enemy," said Gujarati analyst Achyut Yagnik.
FEAR OF CONVERSIONS
Hardline Hindus have long complained about special rights given to minorities in this officially secular country. Hindus make up about 83 percent of India's over one billion people, Muslims roughly 12 percent and Christians about three percent.
The constitution allows different religious groups their own civil codes, especially for laws governing marriage and divorce, and their own schools.
Christian-run schools are among the best in the country thanks to generous church support and a tradition which dates back to British rule before independence in 1947. But hardline Hindu groups, including the activist Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), which say they aim to right the wrongs of centuries of Muslim and then British rule, claim the schools are a front for conversions, a charge the schools themselves deny.
"I think the church wants to convert India," says VHP leader Pravin Togadiya. "If this is a purely educational activity, why should there be a priest in every educational institution?"
Though the VHP denies involvement, that suspicion erupted into open violence against Christians in Subir and the surrounding tribal region of Dangs four years ago.
Jesuit priest Father Anthony and his assistant were stoned and the school's outhouse and jeep set ablaze in an attack on Christmas Day, 1998.
Mobs also attacked a convent school in nearby Ahwa, armed with sickles, axes and stones, terrifying the nuns inside.
Churches were burned down and as the violence spread, an Australian missionary and his family were burned to death in their car in eastern India in late 1999. TRIBALS
Caught in the middle are the Kunkna tribals, who until barely half a century ago remained cut off from the outside world in the thickly forested hills of Dangs, living in huts of grass and mud, worshipping nature and surviving off the land.
Now they have roads, sprawling villages and houses with wide verandahs and tiled roofs, hidden behind trees and bougainvillaea.
They still hold their own festivals, dancing through the night to the beat of drums, while old men recite folk tales with echoes of other religions -- in one a boy and a girl escape from a flood in a huge gourd, carrying seeds from all species; other tales resemble those told in Africa or elsewhere in India.
"These stories could be as old as the beginning of human civilisation," says Dayabhai Vadhu, a bank employee in Ahwa, who is writing down the tales before they disappear.
He worries about both the Hindu and Christian influences which have crept in over the last 40 to 50 years, seeing the competition between the two as a danger to tribal traditions.
"It's a bit like pulling somebody's arm in one direction and the other arm in the other direction," he says.
Hindu groups are slowly starting schools themselves to teach Hindu culture in the area.
And in the Christian schools, the tribal children learn the habits of the modern western world rather than the old mysteries of nature.
As for the tribal villagers themselves, they are bemused.
"There are no Hindus, no Christians, we are all Adivasis," says Rajubhai Pawar, a village leader in Subir.
"We have remained untouched by the presence of missionaries here, and only those who know how to read and write would know anything about the VHP. In this village there are no politics."