Bankim’s Rajmohan’s Wife : A Portrayal of Gendered Subaltern Shahnaj Parvin Lecturer, Department of English City University, Dhaka, Bangladesh Email: shahnajshammee@gmail.com Abstract Critical appraisal on the life and works of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee is abound but, even after more than one hundred and fifty years, a very few studies have delved into studying his first and only novel written in English, Rajmohan’s Wife (1864;1935), also happened to be the first novel in English by an Asian writer. Among those very few studies, analysis on national allegorical significance is a major and common issue. A few critics have interpreted this novel from colonial perspective. Sufferings of Indian wives and emergence of unshackled womanhood have been upheld in one or two articles. But no researcher has yet attempted to examine the novel from postcolonial perspective by exploring the fact that women are considered as ‘subaltern’ or ‘other’. Under the texture of a typical familial story of nineteenth century Bengal Bankim has knitted another story of exploitation where, within the same social structure, one gender is subverting another from the center to the periphery and making them ‘other’ as the colonizers, exercising hegemonic power, do to the colonial people. Specially, by depicting male dominating society through the actions of Rajmohan, Mathur and Madhav as well as by depicting vulnerability of female characters in Rajmohan’s Wife, Bankim has shed some light on the patterns and textures of subalternity, surveillance and subordinance that are inscribed and re-inscribed in the social and individual psyche of the then patriarchal society. So, this research, qualitative in nature, will explore the novel, Rajmohan’s Wife, using post colonial analytical tools alongside the feminist approach, and show how women are considered as “Subaltern or the other”. Keywords: Gendered Subaltern, Hegemony, Subjugation, Women as Other, Althussarian trick.