The Man Who Made Plants Write

An internationally celebrated poet and critic translates Jagadish Chandra Bose’s revolutionary writings on plant sentience and communicationJagadish 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.