ABSTRACT
On February 14, 2002, I stood in a packed seminar room at the Eastern University in Chenkaladi, a few miles north of the town of Batticoloa in the Eastern Province of Sri Lanka, preparing to spend an hour with the second-year undergraduate sociology concentrators, who were taking a course on nationalism with my friend and colleague Suresh Sivaraman. 1 As we were driving up to the campus on the road of stunning beauty that leads north of the city-the still, almost gray waters of the lagoon on one side, yellow-green fields on the other-I had suggested a lecture on Anderson’s (1984) Imagined Communities. “It is so canonical, maybe I should do it?” I had asked, and he had kept driving, smiling to himself. I had wondered to myself why he did not teach it.
