At a time when environmental thinkers are re-examining humanity’s relationship with the natural world, The Man Who Made Plants Write feels unexpectedly contemporary. In this selection from Abyakta (The Unsaid, 1922), translated by Sumana Roy, readers encounter the Bengali scientist and polymath Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858-1937), whose work ranged from radio and microwave research to plant physiology. Educated in Calcutta, Cambridge and London, Bose brought international scientific training to colonial India while remaining deeply committed to Bengali intellectual life. His lifelong advocacy of science in Bangla reflected a belief that knowledge should be accessible beyond elite academic circles. More than a literary rediscovery, the volume reveals a thinker equally at home in experiment, observation and reflection.
Some of the collection’s most memorable essays arise from Bose’s engagement with the natural world. Seeds, saplings and trees inhabit pages not simply as specimens but as living presences, bound to larger cycles of growth and renewal. In The Plant’s Story, the Story of Plants, published in Bengali titled Gachher Katha, he writes: “Seeds are a tree’s eggs; the tree’s babies are sleeping inside its seeds.” The earth, meanwhile, receives them “like a mother.” The language occasionally leans towards sentiment, yet it is grounded in close observation and wonder. Elsewhere, describing a plant’s response to injury, Bose wryly remarks that although a schoolmaster’s cane may have produced a few High Court judges, “all kinds of injury stunt growth.” He moves characteristically from experiment to reflection, using the behaviour of plants to illuminate broader questions about life and nurture.
The book takes its title from one of Bose’s most memorable questions. Seeking to understand how plants respond to injury, nourishment, light and stress, he asks in The Speechless Life (Nirbak Jibon): “Will it be possible to get the tree to write about this time?” His crescograph and other recording instruments were designed to magnify and register minute plant movements and growth responses that eluded ordinary observation.
Bose’s curiosity extended far beyond plant physiology. In the 1890s, he conducted pioneering experiments with very short radio waves, now described as millimetre waves, and devised components for generating, transmitting and detecting them. The significance of this work lies in its contribution to the early study of microwave and radio-wave optics. His scientific vision eventually found institutional form in the Bose Institute, established in Calcutta in 1917. At its inauguration, he described it as “not merely a laboratory, but a temple,” suggesting that scientific inquiry was, for him, an undertaking involving intellect, discipline and values.
In the collection, Bose moves effortlessly across botany, physics, spirituality and education, yet a common thread runs through these essays: an interest in phenomena that lie beyond immediate perception. In pieces such as The Invisible Light (Adrishya Alok) and The Resonance and Conceivable World of the Sky (Akash-Spondon o Akash-Sombhob Jogothe) he reflects on unseen energies, wireless communication and the limits of human knowledge. “Blind people have imagined different forms of the same animal by touching different parts of an elephant’s body,” he writes. “We imagine energy similarly.” Rather than presenting science as a catalogue of certainties, Bose treats it as an effort to apprehend realities that remain partially hidden from view. The visible and the known, these essays suggest, form only a small part of a much wider universe.
Other essays reveal his engagement with questions of individual and collective growth. In Initiation (Diksha), he writes: “One of the great truths about life is that from the day our desire to grow is suspended the shadow of death begins to fall on life.” Extending the idea to societies and nations, he argues that decline begins when the impulse to learn and develop is lost. Such passages reveal a writer concerned not only with scientific discovery but also with the conditions that allow human communities to flourish.
In Folded Hands (Anjali), science, history and spirituality converge in particularly striking ways. Moved by the frescoes of Ajanta, Bose reflects on the relationship between knowledge and humility. Scientific discovery, he suggests, exposes the limitations of individual understanding while intimating a deeper harmony underlying existence. The essay culminates in an image of reconciliation: “Light and shadow, happiness and indispensable sorrow, stand in their respective places. Then the rays from those two raised, joined-and folded-hands pierce the darkness and illuminate the whole scene.”
In the introduction, Roy situates Bose not merely as an inventor and scientist but as a writer whose work was deeply connected to language and culture. Particularly illuminating is her discussion of his commitment to writing science in Bangla. Bose’s observation that “the language that a man learns in his mother’s arms is the language in which he expresses his happiness and sorrow” acquires renewed significance here. Roy broadens our understanding of a figure often remembered through a handful of scientific milestones, while her translation preserves the clarity, humour and lyricism of his prose.
Not all of Bose’s interpretations sit comfortably with contemporary science. Plants perceive and respond to stimuli through electrical, chemical and hydraulic signalling, but current research does not establish that they possess feelings or consciousness in the human or animal sense. It is therefore more accurate to describe Bose as measuring plant growth and physiological responses than as proving plant sentience.
Roy’s lucid translation restores a body of work that is intellectually adventurous and deeply readable. A century after these essays first appeared, they continue to reward readers with their blend of observation, speculation and wonder. The book reminds us that knowledge begins not only with measurement and analysis but also with the willingness to look closely at the world and ask unexpected questions.