Jagadish Chandra Bose was a Bengali scientist who convinced a largely skeptical world that plants are living beings. I first encountered his work in an essay called “Ahoto Udbhid” (“The Injured Plant”), in which he records a plant’s response to different kinds of stimuli.
Excerpted from the translator’s introduction to The Man Who Made Plants Write: Essays by Jagadish Chandra Bose. Reprinted with permission from Yale University Press.
Passionate and defensive in his argument, Bose, groping for analogies that would convey the emotional and intellectual stature he discerned in plants, turns to schoolchildren:
I hit the plant with a cane. The plant’s growth reduced immediately. It took the plant more than half an hour to forget this injury. After that it began growing spontaneously as before. O cane-wielding schoolmaster, there is no doubt that some have become judges of the High Court because of being pulled by the ears by you. That boys would grow tall because of being struck by your cane is doubtful though. All kinds of injury stunt growth.
Who was this man who hit plants with a cane and imagined how it would feel to pull them by the ears?
Born to a Brahmo Samaj family in Munshiganj (what is now Bangladesh), Jagadish Chandra studied in Kolkata’s Hare School and St. Xavier’s College, though he also spent time in Faridpur and Bardhaman, where his father, Bhagawan Chandra Bose, was deputy magistrate. Bhagawan insisted that his son study in a Bangla language school before he was forced to acquire the English language, and Jagadish Chandra would continue to feel an affection, attachment, and patriotism for his native tongue throughout his life. “The language that a man learns in his mother’s arms is the language in which he expresses his happiness and sorrow,” he writes in the preface to Abyakta, a collection of his essays published in 1922.
Jagadish Chandra went on to study the natural sciences at the University of Cambridge and University College London, following which he returned to teach at Presidency University in Kolkata. He would eventually establish the Bose Institute in 1917, where most of his research instruments are still preserved. But even as his international profile rose, his ambitions remained rooted in Bangla:
About thirty years ago, I’d written a few of my scientific writings and other essays in English. I had started researching on electric waves and life, and that led to my involvement in several legal cases. The court for this is abroad, where arguments can only be made in the European languages. … Isn’t this insulting to our national life, to the life of our jaati, our community? To redeem this, I have tried to establish a scientific court in this country. I might not live to see the fruit of this; the fate of scientific institutions is in the hands of god.
Folklore has it that Bose, having accidentally stepped on Mimosa pudica (lajjabati in Bangla, meaning “shy one” or “shameplant”), and, surprised by the folding of its leaves, decided to find out more about plant behavior, plants’ responses and ways of communication. “Is there any possible relation between our own life and that of the plant world?” This question, which we find recurring throughout Jagadish Chandra’s work, propelled much of his research. In a letter to his friend Rabindranath Tagore, after naming Western scientists who have refused to accept that plants are living beings, he writes:
What I am doing is against accepted opinion. Just as cutting a tree from near its root leads to its fall, its rest on the earth, similarly with many old theories. Many things will need to be rewritten, and written afresh, and, for this, battles will have to be fought with old conventional thought. What I have discovered gives me a lot of courage, but patience—patience patience. This virtue we lack.
Abyakta (“The Unsaid” or “The Unmanifest”), was published in 1922, the same year as James Joyce’s Ulysses, TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, and books by Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. It was also the year Bertolt Brecht’s first play was staged, not to mention when the world met Picasso’s Cubism and Sinclair Lewis’s Babbit. WH Auden, summarizing the age, said that the “climate” had changed. No list of books from 1922 includes Bose’s book, of course. “Climate” is an interesting word to hear a hundred years later, when it has moved from being a noun to functioning as an adjective—from Auden’s literary or intellectual “climate” to the doom of “climate change.” Bose, however, didn’t use the word. Its utilitarian meaning would have put him off, as would its summarizing instinct. His ambition was different: he would let the plants speak for themselves, he would be a facilitator, he would design instruments that would record their language. A hundred years later, we are returning to that moment. It’s also pertinent to ask ourselves what might—and should—have happened had Bose’s work found better circulation outside colonial Bengal, from where, in a laboratory deprived of support and infrastructure, he carried on with his experiments.
I would like to spend a little time with Bose’s book so as to show similarities and divergences between his thoughts and those of his contemporaries. The year 1922 also saw the publication of Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s story “In a Bamboo Grove”, the main source of Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon; in it was, besides other innovations, the emphatic philosophical truism that there are multiple points of view. Bose couldn’t have read that story, but his philosophical and scientific investigations were driven by a similar belief in the multiplicity of perspectives to be found in the world, a rejection of the centrality of the human.
What Akutagawa, and later Kurosawa, were seeking to show through narrative, the Indian scientist wanted to import to an understanding of plant life. That the language of plants was just different from ours, for Bose, simply reflected the nature of language of various life forms that seem incomprehensible to other species.
In Abyakta we encounter Bose’s restlessness and passion, his affection for the neglected. In the world of science, with its performance of objectivity, in which emotions are suppressed and scientists expected to behave with the neutrality of the instruments they use, this passion is, of course, an exception. Reading the prehistory of emotions that attended his experiments, something not generally granted to us by scientists, we become aware of the scientist’s nerves as he sets out to discover and prove the nervous system in plants. Such questions and anxieties become manifest in the first section of his essay “The Silent Life” (1922):
The sapling, growing inch by inch, its growth invisible to the naked eye—how will I record its growth from moment to moment with a machine? Will an external injury affect the character and rate of its growth? Does giving it food—or depriving it of food—change it, and how long does it take for the change to begin? Will giving it medicine or poison cause it to change? Will it be possible for one poison to counteract the effect of another kind of poison in the plant? Can the amount of one poison undo the effect of another? If a tree responds to an external injury, how long will it take for this response to materialize? Does the duration of that feeling change in a different situation? Will it be possible to get the tree to write about this time? How does the injury reach the tree’s inside? Does it have a nervous system? If it does, how is the speed of the nerve’s excitement communicated? Do favorable circumstances cause an increment in its speed? Do adverse circumstances prevent that? Are there similarities between our nervous system and the plant’s? Can the changes in speed be recorded by the plant itself ? Do plants have muscles like there are in the human heart? In the end, when death comes to a tree, is it possible to record that moment of nirvana? And does the tree respond fiercely to that moment before falling into an everlasting sleep? Only a history of these different moments, captured by different instruments, will give us the true and uninterrupted history of plant life.
This is the language of affection, of imploration, and indeed, of activism. It was this desire to discover the plant’s script that made Jagadish Bose design a variety of instruments, none of which seemed to satisfy him completely, for he was always trying to design another one, one more sophisticated and acknowledging of the invisible life of plants—the electro-optic analogue, the shielded lens antenna, resonant recorder, phytograph, plant photograph, automatic photograph, Bubler instrument, plant sphygmograph, and, of course, the best-known among them, the crescograph. The design of these instruments came from his living in both the physical and botanical sciences. His sole collaborator was a tinsmith by the name of Putiram Das. Convinced that to know about plant life we must go to the plants themselves, he designed his scientific instruments to be as “sensitive” as possible, a word appropriate as much for the efficiency of these instruments as it is for his empathy. What he wanted to record was response to various kinds of stimuli, of course, but if one notices carefully, this is actually a record of injury, of hurt, a First Information Report of the effect of burning or cold, electric voltage or darkness. He wanted plants to write their autobiography in their own script, “torulipi,” the plant script. This must be one of the most non-anthropocentric practical philosophies imagined by a human.
A hundred years after the publication of this book, as scientists and humanists begin to acknowledge what they call “plant intelligence” and even “plant emotions,” borrowing the nouns from a register of self-congratulatory humanism, we notice the lineage of Bose’s unacknowledged work—the sensitivity of plants to sound and electric voltage, their ability to store and communicate information, that they “do not suffer in silence … when thirsty or stressed, they emit ‘airborne sounds’ in response to stress or when they are cut,” that they “cry” or “can also be anesthetized and lose their responses to external stimuli … plants are known to produce endogenous anesthetic compounds to deal with stress.” As you read this book, a collection of talks and essays delivered and written for children and adults, you will perhaps discover the revolutionary imagination that compelled the public scientist, a philosopher of life, to seek answers to the most fundamental question, one that I think possessed him in everything that he did, from his investigation of radio microwave optics to his work on the behavior of metals to the plant sciences: what is life, and is response the sign that marks the living?