Anderson situates the origin of this linguistic evolution in Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but he finds its real impact in nationalist movements in societies colonized by western European nations. The work of “imagining the community” was performed by “pil- grim creole functionaries and provincial creole printmen.”Through them, a model “of the independent national state was available for pirating,” a model which privileged the ideas that specific groups of people owned their languages and that “these groups, imagined as communities, were entitled to their autonomous place in a fraternity of equals.”Thousands of colonized bureaucrats made their way to the colonial metropole, in search of this fra- ternity, and found themselves excluded by the uglier, more racist fact that imperialism and its instruction in the language of the empire, did not guar- antee one the right to belong to the imperial nation—to what Anderson calls the “official nationalism.”And so the new intelligentsia, created by the schools and bureaucratic needs of the empire, became central to the devel- opment of nationalism in the colonial regions, their “bilingual literacy” giv- ing them a “vanguard role.”

Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Coloni…, loc. 92