Remembering Benedict Anderson
By Ghulam Mohammad Khan
21 December, 2015
Countercurrents.org
The famous South Asia scholar and the author of Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983), one of the most influential historical, political-cum-philosophical texts of its time, Benedict Anderson passed away on December 13, 2015 in the city of Malang, Indonesia. He was seventy nine.
Born in 1936 in Kunming, China to an Anglo-Irish Chinese Maritime Customs employee and an English mother, Benedict Anderson was not particularly known for his profound scholarship or the rich academic legacy left behind by him, but his sharp, intense and unwavering criticism of the tortuous Suharto regime in Indonesia also won him the international renown and readership. After completing his time as a scholarship student at Eton, Anderson graduated from Cambridge University and then moved to University of Cornell in 1958. It was from this university that Anderson moved to Indonesia to complete his dissertation in 1961. Slowly, Anderson became acutely involved in the socio-political situation of the country. His highly critical paper about the killings of around 500,000 people due to Suharto’s brutal seizure of power in 1965-66 got him banned from Indonesia for three decades. Indonesia and its people were very dear to him. His death in Indonesia has been treated as a moment of remorse and sadness.
Talking to media on his demise, David Biggs, a Southeast Asia scholar at UC Riverside said, “He was one of a few American scholars who really just dished it out to the Suharto regime…and he suffered for it. People respect him for that.” Though these facts can hardly be excluded from any discussions on his life and achievements, but the reality behind his growing eminence across academic circles in the world is indubitably his touchstone text ‘Imagined Communities’ in which he acutely discusses the idea of ‘nation’ or ‘nation-ness’, which continues to be a high-octane debate in contemporary literary and political thought. Anderson’s intellectual musings, clad in a typical, sometimes recondite language, may seem complex, but these musings are mostly focused on the ‘complex situation’ in which human life is lived. In a tribute to Anderson, a reporter Jill Leovy wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “Anderson drew lofty ideas from low places. He combed obscure government registers, shipping news, songs and poems. He grounded sweeping theoretical assertions in the arcana of everyday life – a postcard, a piece of classroom art, a colonial officer’s collection of relics.”
Imagined Communities
After more than three decades of its publication, Anderson’s seminal work Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism continues to be invoked by a number of contemporary historians, literary, political and cultural theorists in relation to the formation and changing perceptions of nation, print-capitalism, ideology and more recently to the rise of burgeoning militant organizations like ISIL and Boko Haram. To a normal person, the idea of nation or nationalism may seem normal (because the idea of belonging to nation has indelibly become a consciousness), but Anderson saw nation as weird and complex ‘shrunken imaginings of the recent history’. Anderson believed that ‘nationality’, ‘nationalism’ or ‘nation-ness’ are simply the cultural artifacts the existence of which command ‘a profound emotional legitimacy’ now. According to him the formation of nationalism towards the close of 18th century was actually the ‘spontaneous distillation of a complex crossing of discrete historical forces’ merged with discrete religious, political and ideological constellations. Nation, he maintained, is imagined because ‘members of the even smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the mind of each lives the image of their communities’. Communities, according to him, are not distinguished by the way they act, but by the style in which they are imagined. Nation is also imagined as sovereign and limited because even the ‘largest of them encompassing a billion living human beings has finite boundaries beyond which lie other nations’. Within these boundaries the people share what Anderson calls a ‘deep, horizontal comradeship’ or a stretchable net of ‘clientship or kinship”. Talking about the cultural roots of nationalism, Anderson asserted that cenotaphs, tombs, emblems of soldiers, eminent personalities or remnants of any cultural significance are also locked together with nationalist imaginings.
Print-capitalism, Anderson opined, astonishingly changed the appearance of the world. The profuse of print production, signaling Benjamin’s ‘age of mechanical reproduction’, in diverse languages brought together hundreds of thousands, even millions of people reading printed material in similar ‘language fields’. These people connected through print, form, ‘in their secular, particular, visible invisibility, the embryo of the nationally imagined community’. In this way nationalism emerges from an explosive interaction between capitalism, technology and linguistic diversity.
Anderson believed that newspapers epitomized the print-capitalism. We may be conscious of what we do to newspapers (we read them), but most of the time, we are not conscious of what newspapers do to us in return. Peter Zinoman, UC Berkeley history professor and former Anderson student writes in this connection, “You have to understand the novelty of the morning paper. All these people get up at the same time … and identify with the child who fell down a well. At some point, they become willing to die for an abstraction similar to that which links them to the child.” Print-capitalism, Anderson maintained, allowed overarching ‘identity discourses to be published across various vernacular languages allowing for a sameness and diffusion of ideas linked to the nation’.
No doubt, in the contemporary debates in post-colonial political and literary theory some of his theoretical assumptions are challenged, but the relevance of his ideas like ‘imagined communities’, ‘print-capitalism’ and his expertise with language, which the New Republic called “superhuman” cannot be easily dismissed.
Benedict Anderson was also a polyglot. After his deportation from Indonesia under Suharto, Anderson spent much time with the learning of Thai, Spanish, Tagalog and developed mastery in these languages in due course of time. He closely studied the relation between language and power in his books like Language and power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia (1990) and The fate of Rural Hell: Asceticism and desire in Buddhist Thailand (2012). Presently, Anderson is survived by his brother Perry Anderson, who is also a UCLA history professor, his sister, and his two sons Yudi and Beni. In academic circles around the globe, Anderson’s name will be repeated over and over for years to come.
Ghulam Mohammad Khan PhD Research Scholar at Central University of Haryana, India.
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