Man Who Made Plants Write

An internationally celebrated poet and critic translates Jagadish Chandra Boses revolutionary writings on plant sentience and communicationJagadish Chandra Bose (18581937) 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 a unvoiced lifea ? that he recorded as a a scripta ? with a crescograph, a device that measured how plants respond to each other and their environments.Inviting readers into the a resounding silence of the green plant kingdom,a ? he described an underlying unity beneath the multiplicity of phenomena, and a world in which a endless music is sung everywhere.a ? 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 Boses essay collection Abyakta (a The Unsaida ?; 1922), Sumana Roy reveals the revolutionary character of his mind, as poetic and philosophical as it was scientific.