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History Optional PYQ Master Pack · Model answer

Critically examine: “An ideology of paternalistic benevolence, occasionally combined with talk of trusteeship and training towards self-government, thinly veiled the realities of a Raj uncompromisingly white and despotic.”

  • UPSC 2018
  • Constitutional Developments in Colonial India, 1858-1935

The colonial state dressed its rule in the vocabulary of guardianship — the "civilizing mission," trusteeship, and the promise of graduated self-government — even as its actual institutions remained rigidly racial and autocratic.

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What the full answer covers

  • The Rhetoric of Paternalism and Trusteeship
  • The Despotic Reality Beneath the Rhetoric
  • Ideology as Instrument, Not Accident
  • None of this Empties the Idiom of All Effect

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