"This book is concerned with novels, and specifically with the many ways in which the early novel in India negotiated its inescapable relationship with colonial modernity... we follow Bankim in probing the novel's role in one of colonialism's central cultural transactions: to promote the modern English-educated woman who will make an intelligent, capable, and companionable wife... other writers discussed found it impossible to dissociate the modernity of the novel form from modern ideas about how a husband should relate to his wife, as well as from the more public authenticating discourses of post-Enlightenment Europe... the anxiety to be modern demonstrated a familiarity with modernity's knowledge-producing protocols and it often ended up cramping rather than facilitating the free development of the early Indian novel." --cover page 4.