To those of us outside of Southeast Asia, Benedict Anderson is best known as the author of Imagined Communities, the seminal study of nationalism and one of the most popular scholarly books of the second half of twentieth century.

But in Indonesia, where he passed away on December 13, Anderson was known primarily as an “Indonesianist.”

The country was the subject of Anderson’s PhD work. And his first major publication — coauthored with his colleagues at Cornell University — chronicled the massacre of six hundred thousand Indonesians as part of the 1965–66 repression of the communist left leading up to Lieutenant General Suharto’s coup. The work earned him a ban from Indonesia that lasted until 1998, when the reign of the “mediocre tyrant” — as Anderson memorably called Suharto — finally came to an end.