Anderson’s linguistic fluency was almost superhuman. Perry Anderson could read all the major European languages but once ruefully declared his big brother was the true polyglot of the family: Benedict could read Dutch, German, Spanish, Russian, and French and was fully conversant in Indonesian, Javanese, Tagalog, and Thai; he claimed he often thought in Indonesian. (The ability to acquire languages ran in the family—Melanie Anderson, an anthropologist and the younger sister of Perry and Benedict, is fluent in Albanian, Greek, Serbo-Croatian). 

An Indonesian friend of mine once marveled that Benedict Anderson was so at ease in Javanese that he could tell jokes in the language. The friend also favorably compared Anderson with another great expert on Indonesia, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz. “I always profit from reading Geertz but he simply deepens my understanding of Indonesia,” my friend said. “Anderson makes me see things about Indonesia that I never noticed. He knows Indonesia as well as any Indonesian.”  

Between 1965 and 1966, Indonesia was engulfed in counter-revolutionary violence that led to the American-supported anti-Communist dictator Suharto taking power in 1967. Between 600,000 and one million Indonesians, most of them supporters of the nation’s largest communist party, were killed by the resulting purge. The Central Intelligence Agency, which actively participated in helping the Indonesian military choose targets, called it in a 1968 declassified study “one of the worst mass murders of the twentieth century.”

The violence of Suharto’s coup was a key turning point in Anderson’s life. It “felt like discovering that a loved one is a murderer,” he wrote. He threw himself into the cause of chronicling the true history of the coup and to countering the propaganda of the Suharto regime. While at Cornell in 1966, Anderson and his colleagues anonymously authored “The Cornell Paper,” a report which became a key document in debunking the official account of the coup, and which was circulated widely in Indonesian dissident circles. Anderson was also one of the only two foreign witnesses at the 1971 show trial of Sudisman, the general secretary of the Indonesian communist party, who was sentenced to death. Anderson would later translate and publish Sudisman’s testimony, another key text in Indonesian history.

In 1972, Anderson was expelled from Indonesia, becoming an exile from the nation he made his own. He would return to Indonesia only in 1998, after the overthrow of the Suharto regime. After a brief private visit to friends, Anderson had an emotionally charged public event sponsored by the leading Indonesian paperTempo.

In a brilliant article in the magazineLingua Franca, the journalist Scott Shermandescribed Anderson’s return to Indonesia: 

At a luxury hotel in downtown Jakarta, the sixty-two-year-old Anderson, wearing a light shirt and slacks to combat the stifling heat, faced a tense, expectant audience of three hundred generals, senior journalists, elderly professors, former students, and curiosity seekers. In fluent Indonesian, he lashed the political opposition for its timidity and historical amnesia—especially with regard to the massacres of 1965-1966.

During his return to Indonesia, Anderson was reunited with a young Chinese communist who had been on trial with Sudisman. Anderson had thought this young man had been killed with Sudisman. His miraculous survival was one sign that the Suharto regime hadn’t destroyed everything. 

Anderson’s most famous work, Imagined Communities, emerged from the the crucible of Indonesian history. How do diverse nations like Indonesia, made up of many languages and ethnicities, hold together? Why do they sometimes fall apart? What keeps people in large nations from killing each other and why does national cohesion sometime fail? These weren’t abstract questions for Anderson, but were instead born out of lived immersion in Indonesian history.  

WhileImagined Communitiesis Anderson’s best-known work, everything he wrote is worth reading—there are few more thoughtful studies of transnational terrorism than his Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination (2005). As well-versed in novels and poetry as he was in scholarship, Anderson was an eloquent advocate for global culture, calling attention to the literatures of Indonesia and the Philippines. A world traveler, it is fitting that Benedict Anderson died in Indonesia, a country he could truly call home.