Section 4 of the Indian Contract Act 1872, provides that an offer is complete when it comes to the knowledge of the offeree and that an acceptance is complete as against the offeror when it is put in the course of transmission by the acceptor so as to be out of his power and as against the acceptor when it comes to the knowledge of the offeror. Section 5 provides that the offer can be revoked at any time before the acceptance is dispatched and that an acceptance can be revoked at any time before it comes to the knowledge of the offeror. Section 5 ostensibly departed from the English law as it allowed for the acceptance to be revoked by a more expeditious means than the one used to communicate it. But when the question arose as to moment of contract formation envisaged by a combined reading of sections 4 and 5, following the English law—that has orbited around Adams v. Lindsell (1818)1—the courts in India found the provisions to support the ‘dispatch rule’: that the contract is formed at the moment the acceptance is dispatched, or put out of the power of the acceptor. It is argued here that the law on the moment of contract formation applied by the courts in India and endorsed by the scholarly literature rests on a mistaken understanding of sections 4 and 5 of the Indian Contract Act, 1872.