Man Who Made Plants Write: Essays by Jagadish Chandra Bose
Man Who Made Plants Write: Essays by Jagadish Chandra Bose
Man Who Made Plants Write: Essays by Jagadish Chandra Bose
Description
Description
An internationally celebrated poet and critic translates Jagadish Chandra Bose's revolutionary writings on plant sentience and communication
Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858-1937) was a Bengali scientist and polymath who developed a theory of plant communication more than a century ago. Bose suggested that plants had their own vocabulary, an "unvoiced life" that he recorded as a "script" with a crescograph, a device that measured how plants respond to each other and their environments. Inviting readers into the "resounding silence of the green plant kingdom," he described an underlying unity beneath the multiplicity of phenomena, and a world in which "endless music is sung everywhere." Dismissed as idiosyncratic and unscientific when he was alive, Bose provocatively challenged the hierarchy of living beings, which relegated plants to the bottom, and created a mesmerizing body of work on nonhuman intelligence. Through her lyrical translations from Bose's essay collection Abyakta ("The Unsaid"; 1922), Sumana Roy reveals the revolutionary character of his mind, as poetic and philosophical as it was scientific.
About the Author
About the Author
Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858-1937) was a pioneer in radio waves, electromagnetism, and plant science. His books published in English include Response in the Living and Non-Living (1902) and The Nervous Mechanism of Plants (1926). Sumana Roy is the author of How I Became a Tree, Provincials, and Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal, among other books.
Critical Reviews
Critical Reviews
"Bose writes with lyrical brio and flashes of humor about his efforts to persuade the tree 'to testify about itself' and his search for 'whether there is a measuring rod for the state of being alive.'"--Harper's Magazine "Now that plant intelligence is an established field of study, [Bose's ideas] seem prescient."--Andrew Robinson, Nature "J. C. Bose was a true polymath, whose science was propelled by reason and passion. In this wonderful collection of essays--first published in Bengali a hundred years ago--he persuasively represents plants as living beings, bearing witness to their emotional life, their memories of the stimuli they receive and the injuries they suffer. In Sumana Roy's elegant translation, Bose's arguments remain fresh, vivid, and compelling to those reading his book in English today."--Ramachandra Guha, author of Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism "Sumana Roy's The Man Who Made Plants Write is a fine introduction to the literary oeuvre of the scientist who pioneered the study of plant sentience."-Amitav Ghosh, author of Wild Fictions: Essays on Literature, Empire, and the Environment "In these pages, we glimpse the possibility of a science with heart and soul--and receive a powerful inspiration to take the Bengali intellectual and cultural world of the turn of the last century with new seriousness."--Matthew Battles, Harvard University "This collection exposes readers across the globe to the visionary originality and breadth of Bose's thought."--Amit Baishya, University of Oklahoma "An exceptionally readable page-turner."--Jayson Maurice Porter, University of Maryland, College Park
Publishing Information
Publishing Information
Publisher:
Yale University Press
Pub date:
2026-03-17
Length:
144 pages
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