What is the idea of an 'imagined community' as described by Benedict Anderson?
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 1
The correct answer is Option (1) → The spread of mass media gives people a sense of togetherness even if they do not meet physically.
Option (1) The spread of mass media gives people a sense of togetherness even if they do not meet physically. — Correct. When newspapers reached a mass audience, people in different corners of a country found themselves reading or hearing the same news and began to feel connected, a ‘we feeling’. Benedict Anderson argued that this helped the growth of nationalism: people who did not even know of each other’s existence felt like members of a family. Since such a nation is held together by a sense of togetherness among people who never meet, he called it an ‘imagined community’.
Option (2) The spread of mass media allowed people to protest against the British. — Incorrect. The press did carry the voice of the national movement, but Anderson’s idea is about the feeling of belonging that common news creates, not about organising protest.
NCERT (2025-26): “7.1 The Beginnings of Modern Mass Media … People living in different corners of the country found themselves reading or hearing the same news. It has been suggested that this was in many ways responsible for people across a country to Visuals of a Printing Press and a TV Newsroom in 21st Century, India feel connected and develop a sense of belonging or ‘we feeling’. 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’.” |