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Synopsis This book seeks to appreciate the trends of imperial perceptions of India and her institutions. Thematically, the drift and propensities of imperial perceptions etched out here are valid for the whole period of Raj which was initiated with the assumption of authority by the British crown from the East India Company. The Delhi durbar of 1877 signified the frank and unambiguous demonstration by the Raj of its determination to hold India. The book attempts to capture the broad parameters and intricate detours of imperial perceptions of India especially since the over-confident days of the adolescent Raj in the mid-seventies of the nineteenth century.The Raj was the central piece of the British empire. Its influence in imperial strategy was enormous. Economic power, military authority and diplomatic ascendancy of the empire were sustained by the centrality of the Raj in British imperial psychology. The Raj was almost a national obsession in Britain. Its demise caused an equally compelling neurosis. India deposited in British national consciousness layers of racial silt. British sensibility with regard to the Raj, therefore, displayed an arrogant and an authoritarian programme which was quite different from the fraternal fellow-feelings which were displayed towards Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and Rhodesia.The primary object of the work is to weave a pattern and discover a meaning in imperial sensibility.