Man Who Made Plants Write - Essays By Jagadish Chandra Bose

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

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.

Product details

• Authors: Jagadish Chandra Bose
• Assisted by: Sumana Roy (Translation)
• Publisher: Yale University Press Ltd
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Release: 26.05.2026
• EAN: 9780300278408
• ISBN: 978-0-300-27840-8
• No. of pages: 144
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; Non-fiction book > Nature, technology > Nature: general, reference works; Essays, NATURE / Plants / General, LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Essays, SCIENCE / Life Sciences / Botany, Literary essays, Trees, wildflowers & plants, Botany & plant sciences, Trees, wildflowers and plants: general interest, Botany and plant sciences