The concept given by Benedict Anderson of ‘Imagined community’ refers to
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 4
The correct answer is Option (4) → Nation
Option (1) Imaginary beings — Incorrect. ‘Imagined’ does not mean the members are unreal; they are real people who imagine themselves as one community.
Option (2) Unknown individuals — Incorrect. People who do not know each other are the members of the imagined community; the concept names the community they feel part of, not the strangers themselves.
Option (3) Family members — Incorrect. Family members know one another personally. The point of the concept is that people who will never meet feel like members of a family.
Option (4) Nation — Correct. With the growth of the print media, people in different corners of a country read the same news and developed a sense of belonging or ‘we feeling’. Benedict Anderson argued that this helped the growth of nationalism and suggested that we could think of the nation as an ‘imagined community’.
NCERT (2025-26): “7.1 The Beginnings of Modern Mass Media … The well known scholar Benedict Anderson has thus argued that this helped the growth of nationalism, the feeling that people who did not even know of each other’s existence feel like members of a family. It gave people who would never meet each other a sense of togetherness. Anderson thus suggested that we could think of the nation as an ‘imagined community’.” |