In Times of Siege

by Githa Hariharan

Shiv Murthy is a meek, middle-aged professor of history at a college in New Delhi. When Meena, his twenty-four-year-old ward, breaks her leg, she calls on him for help, even though they barely know each other and even though Murthy’s wife is visiting their daughter in another city. Coping with Meena’s care, struggling with the feeling this intellectual, self-possessed, politically minded, and sexually aware young woman stirs in him, Murthy’s life is thrown into even further turmoil when one of his medieval Indian history lessons is challenged by a group of religious extremists. The university responds by giving Murthy the opportunity to apologize publicly. But increasingly in thrall to Meena and influenced by her political convictions, Murthy takes an entirely unexpected plunge into the political he defies the university and the fundamentalists, and defies as well his most basic sense of who and what he is.

Genres: India, Contemporary, Fiction, Novels, Indian Literature, Literature

224 pages, Hardcover

First published August 19, 2003

About the author

Hariharan was born in Coimbatore and grew up in Bombay and Manila. She obtained a BA (in English) from Bombay University and a MA (in Communications) from Fairfield University (U.S.A.).

Hariharan first worked in the Public Broadcasting System in New York and then with a publishing firm as an editor in India. She currently works as a freelance editor.

In her personal life, she, along with her husband, won the right to have the children named after her (instead of carrying the father's name); in this famous case argued by Indira Jaising, the Supreme Court agreed that the mother was also a "natural guardian" of the child.Template:AIR 1999, 2. SCC 228