Educating
Gita
“It is not without reason that the wise crow in the Ramayana, the crow Bushanda, ‘who has lived in every part of the universe, and knows all events from the beginning of time,’ declares that, though contempt of worldly advantages is necessary to supreme felicity, yet the keenest pain possible is inflicted by extreme poverty.”
– Henry George, Progress and Poverty, p. 354.
During a workshop of graduate and professional historians several years ago, a prominent Americanist and comparative historian was questioned about the limits of comparative history. How, he was asked, does the comparative historian draw a boundary around his or her study? Where should he or she stop? His response, which seemed to go down well with the workshop participants, was that when one was considering different nations and the connections among them, the limits would in some way set themselves; for, he said, it is very difficult “to incorporate an understanding of the lives of starving Indian peasants into historical analysis of western societies.”
No one seemed to bat an eyelid at this observation. No one raised a hand to say something in the order of “we are here because they are there,” and that “we” might want to wonder therefore whether we are complicit in the existence of “starving” Indian “peasants”, whose only function is to provide us with the perimeter to place around our comparative studies. No one added that perhaps there is something fundamentally wrong with historical approaches that set their own limits when they come upon the unusual or people who are difficult to assimilate. Nor, for that matter, did anyone mention that almost ubiquitous comparison labor and immigrant historians have made between the crowded conditions of New York City at the end of the 19th century and those of Bombay, a comparison that draws on the experiences of transplanted Indian peasants in order to provide students of American history with a sense of the hardships many immigrants faced in the United States.
And no one made perhaps the most persuasive response of all. What, someone might have asked, if we were to find that one of the central texts in the study of poverty in American history was fundamentally shaped by the visage of the starving Indian peasant? What then would happen to our natural limits of comparative study? Poof! They would vanish before our very eyes.
Henry George’s Progress
and Poverty, perhaps the most influential text throughout the
Surely, as historians and social theorists, we must strive to be like that wise crow Bushanda, who has “lived in every part of the universe, and knows all events from the beginning of time.”
© Rob Gregg, 2004