Shiv finds himself in hot water when the Hindu right picks up on a series of lessons he's written on a 12th century reform figure named Basava (or Basavanna, depending on how you spell it). He is also in some sense deeply emotionally stunted by a childhood experience, the sudden disappearance of a father who had been a frustrated Indian freedom-fighter. Professor Shiv Murthy is a professor of medieval Indian history at a correspondence university in New Delhi. It's a worthy debut the novel is at once nicely executed (short and to the point), and clearly distinct from the kinds of novels published by Indian authors in the past decade. Even though she won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for The Thousand Faces of Night, In Times of Siege is the first book of hers to appear on a major U.S. I also do a fair bit of plot-summary of In Times of Siege (bear with me), but not of Possession, which is a much-better known story. On the other hand, I say some nice things about Possession, but conclude that its theory about history actually doesn't work. Below, I say some critical things about In Times of Siege, but conclude that Hariharan finds a way of doing it that works. I have been meditating on whether the self-conscious intellectualism of the novels crosses the line into academicism (Bad Writing). As both Hariharan and Byatt have taught at universities on and off, they include a fair bit of direct discussion of the issues both novels have "lectures" alongside straightfoward narration. As novels about academic life, both deal with academic controversies associated with the politicization of academic work in England in the 1970s and 80s, and India in the 1990s, respectively. One was Githa Hariharan's In Times of Siege, and the other A.S. I recently taught, in parallel, two books about relatively unassuming professors whose lives actually become a little bit interesting.