Marking Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's debut as a writer, Rajmohan's Wife is the first published novel in English by an Indian. The novel was serialised in 1864 in a short-lived magazine published from Calcutta, but it did not appear as a book in the author's lifetime. The book soon went into oblivion. A neglected but an interesting book, its plots and characters symbolically map the birth of modern India as well as the modern Indian woman through political, cultural and social contexts.