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.