Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay

Chattopadhyay was among the first graduates of the newly founded University of Calcutta and spent his working life as a colonial civil servant, a deputy magistrate rising through the British administrative ranks by day while writing Bengal's first modern novels by night, a double life common to many of the era's Indian writers under colonial rule.

Anandamath (1882), set during a real eighteenth-century famine and rebellion, follows ascetic rebels rising against exploitation and colonial power; its embedded hymn, 'Vande Mataram,' addressed to the nation personified as mother, was banned by British authorities and became one of the Indian independence movement's rallying anthems, later adopted as the country's national song.

He edited the influential literary journal Bangadarshan and wrote more than a dozen novels establishing prose fiction, previously a minor form in Bengali letters, as the language's dominant literary mode. He died in Calcutta in 1894.