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Sumana Roy 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 mesmerising body of work on nonhuman intelligence. Through her translations from Bose’s essay collection Abyakta (“The Unsaid”; 1922), Roy reveals the revolutionary character of his mind, as poetic and philosophical as it was scientific.

Umar Khalid completed his PhD thesis on the history of the Adivasis of the Singhbhum region...

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