The Nation as an Imagined Community

Today, almost every great power has a monument commemorating the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier – to honor the men and women who laid down their lives in the service of their nation. Ever wondered why you’ve never ever come across the tomb of the unknown Marxist, the unknown Libertarian or the unknown chicken-tikka lover? It’s because nothing moves us the way patriotism does! Why is this so? How did the idea of a nation take root in our collective consciousness?

For the political theorist Benedict Anderson, the nation is an Imagined Community. It’s a socially constructed reality created and sustained by its members. In his work ‘Imagined Communities’, Anderson postulates that the dawn of nationalism in the 18^th century was also marked by the collapse of the hold of religion.

Religion, during its hey days, thrived through rituals and more importantly through the sway of sacred languages on the collective imagination of the masses. Latin, Arabic and Sanskrit were languages that were spoken by few. Reading and interpreting the word of God was a privilege. Pilgrimages and their strict codes – whether it was the Santiago de Compostela journey for the Christians, the Ummah for the Muslims or the Char Dham Yatra for the Hindus, were just an exercise to explore their own religious world order and to meet fellow believers.

While Gutenberg’s printing press revolutionized knowledge transfer, it was Luther’s Protestant movement that converted printing into a large-scale commercial enterprise. In a quest for markets, print-capitalism desperately needed readers. For that, language had to be unified, vernaculars had to be dissed and a standardized grammar became the need of the hour. From this emerged the language of administrations – High German, Modern English, Spanish etc.

Two key outputs of printing – the newspaper and the literary form of the novel made readers perceive time, history and continuity in a new light. With Gods no longer being the center of their lives, with stories from distant lands being reported in the pages of the newspapers and with narrative plots of characters simultaneously moving in and out of time frames in novels; cosmology and history slowly became distinguishable from one another. People suddenly began to realize that traits of a shared language and common history was a powerful glue – and much more emotive than religion. (Even today, all sub-national identities depend on the medium of literature and radio to assert their unique identity. There can be no nationalism without the print media. Language is indeed a powerful force.)

The establishment of a civil service by the colonizers, the ceilings which barred the natives from getting promoted beyond a point also played a seminal role in making subjects realize the difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’.

Anderson’s analysis is primarily Europe and the Americas. I’m not too convinced that the same framework can be used for India in its entirely. The idea of Bharat and a sense of geographic coherence have been a part of our myths and history. Nevertheless, the post 1857 rise of Indian Nationalism would still attest to many of his arguments.