The man who made plants write / essays by Jagadish Chandra Bose ; translated and with an introduction by Sumana Roy.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bose, Jagadis Chandra, 1858-1937, author.

Contributor:

Roy, Sumana, translator.

Language:

Bengali

English

Subjects (All):

Plants--Communication.

Plants.

Literature and science.

Genre:

Translations

Physical Description:

xxv, 112 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

New Haven : Yale University Press, [2026]

Summary:

"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 environment. 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."--Dust jacket flap.

Contents:

Folded hands

The resonance and conceivable world of the sky

The plant's story : The story of plants

The birth and death of plants

The realization of mantra

The invisible light

Literature in science

The speechless life

Thought and action

Offering

Initiation

The injured plant

The flow of stimulus in the nervous system

Hajir!.

Notes:

Translated from the Bengali.

Includes index.

Other Format:

ebook version :

ISBN:

9780300278408

0300278403

OCLC:

1581573974

Publisher Number:

CIPO000355441