Chatterjee was scathing in his attack implying that if the West had already imagined what nationalisms would look like followed by the subsequent colonial exploitation by that logic the postcolonial nation’s ‘imagination must forever remain colonised.’ Chatterjee looks at Bengal as his example and whilst agreeing with Anderson about the spread and consolidation of nationalism through print capitalism he argues that the nationalist elite in Bengal, India drew its strength from the ‘spiritual inner domain, which unlike the material outer domain was not monopolised by or annexed to the colonising West’ (Das-Chaudhuri, 68-69). One might recall Partha Chatterjee’s The Nation and its Fragments (1994) in this instance where he makes a classic rebuttal of Anderson’s assertion that certain modular nationalisms could be superimposed on to other settings.

In a chapter entitled ‘Cultural Roots’ Anderson begins with the image of the Unknown Soldier, one whose identity is irrelevant as he is posited as an icon of ‘national imagining.’ Anderson claims that nationalism has a ‘profoundly modular character’ (Anderson, 1983: 123), which is drawn on more than a century and half of human existence. Anderson notes that regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that individuals might face the nation is still framed as one of equal ‘comradeship’.Īnderson argues against the notion that nations are created through determinants such as race or religion within a given cartographic border but rather these are ‘imagined’ into existence. Anderson’s book is built on two main theses- one that nations which we believe as ancient and a historical construct is a very modern phenomenon, one that has been brought about through capitalism (particularly print capitalism) and secondly the belief that everyone belongs to a nation in some capacity. As one of the most well known cultural commentators of contemporary politics in Southeast Asia his contribution to area studies and cultural politics is immense.īenedict Anderson who died at the age of 79 in Malang, Indonesia is well known for his 1983 book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the origin and Spread of Nationalism, one of the most influential books on studies of nationalism. Anderson was much more than a translator. In a letter to the Indian publisher Naveen Kishore, Benedict Anderson writes that he has left instructions that after his death he be bequeathed with the epitaph ‘He was a Translator’ (31 March 2010).

Benedict anderson