The Man Who Made Plants Write

Essays by Jagadish Chandra Bose

Translated and with an introduction by Sumana Roy

An internationally celebrated poet and critic brings Jagadish Chandra Bose's revolutionary writings on plant sentience and communication to English readers for the first time

Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858–1937) was a Bengali scientist and polymath who developed a theory of plant communication more than a century before Western scientists began to explore such ideas. Bose suggested that plants had their own vocabulary, an "unvoiced life" that he recorded as a "script" with a crescograph and other devices he invented to measure 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 whose originality and significance we at last are able to appreciate today.

Through her lyrical translations and selections 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. Roy, the author of How I Became a Tree, shows how Bose's work can shape how we understand ourselves as a species living alongside and inside the plant world.