Indian women’s team made a great comeback in the final session, picking up four wickets for just 21 runs, restricting England to 269/6 on day 1 of the one-off Test match in Bristol.
Off-spinners Deepti Sharma and Sneh Rana brought India back into the match by dismissing Nat Sciver, Amy Jones, Knight and Georgia Elwiss to reduce the hosts to 251/6.
Sharma accounted for England skipper Heather Knight, who looked well set for a century and more, but fell LBW to the wily off-spinner for 95.
England went into tea with their noses ahead, having put on 162/2, though they lost the crucial wicket of Tammy Beaumont (66) in the second session, to Rana.
After getting rid of Lauren Winfield-Hill (35) in the first session of the day, India toiled hard for most part of the post-lunch period before Rana picked up her maiden Test wicket. She got rid of in-form of Beaumont, who was brilliantly caught by Shafali Verma at short leg.
Beaumont faced 166 balls and decorated her innings with six fours en route to her second Test fifty.
Earlier, the hosts made a solid 86 for one in the opening session.
The Indian pace duo of veteran Jhulan Goswami and Shikha Pandey made a promising start, doing just enough to trouble the English batswoman on more than one occasion.
In the seventh over, Goswami induced an edge from Winfield-Hill as the batter went for an extravagant drive but Smriti Mandhana dropped the chance in the slip cordon despite getting both hands on the ball.
In the next over, Winfield got lucky again. Debutant Pooja Vastrakar induced a thick edge from the batter but the ball flew between second slip and gully to the boundary.
After a slow and cautious start, England picked up the pace. Winfield was the more positive of the two batters as she lofted Pandey over the mid-wicket to hit the first six of the innings and in the process brought up England's fifty in the 17th over.
As many as five players made Test debut for India, including Verma, Deepti Sharma, Vastrakar, Rana and Bhatia, while for England Sophia Dunkley was the lone player to earn a Test cap.
Indian women’s team is playing its first Test match in seven years. It last played the traditional format of the game in November 2014 against South Africa in Mysuru.
(With PTI inputs)
