Jagadish Chandra Bose struck a plant with a cane and then, with a watch in hand, waited for it to forgive him. Growth stalled, then resumed half an hour later. From this small cruelty he drew a large lesson — that injury stunts the sapling as surely as it stunts the schoolboy hit by a cane-wielding headmaster, and that the plant, like the boy hauled up by the ears, keeps account of what is done to it.

The essays in The Man Who Made Plants Write are full of such scenes: a Bengali physicist-turned-physiologist, hunched over instruments of his own devising, coaxing a mute organism into testimony.

Grand ambition

Sumana Roy’s translation of Abyakta — “the unmanifest,” “the unsaid” — which Bose published in Bengali in 1922, introduces English-language readers to a Calcutta scientist who wrote for children. That readership is the point. Bose wrote these pieces in his mother tongue, Bangla, for a broad public and largely for the young, even though the scientific priesthood in England was split over the evidence that he proffered for the emotive life of plants.

What he was after was a unifying theory. Isaac Newton married the falling apple to the orbiting moon; James Clerk Maxwell folded light into electromagnetism; John Dalton weighed the atom; and Charles Darwin ran a single thread of descent through everything that lives. Bose’s ambition belonged to that family. He wanted to abolish the border between the living and the non-living, to show that metal fatigues and recovers like muscle, that a plant startles, tires, and swoons under chloroform. It was audacious and, in its literal form, wrong. But it was not mysticism in a lab coat. It was the era’s most exciting physics pressed into the service of a real hypothesis: that the unseen exerts measurable effects, and that response might be the signature of life wherever it is found.

Roy’s introduction is the finest thing in the volume. She ventured the translation to rescue the legacy of Bose, whose work with plants earned him mocking cartoons, a decade-long refusal by the Royal Society to publish him, and pledges by American laboratories to shield the public from “infantile fancies,” as one director branded Bose. She also reads Bose through the lens of her own childlessness, in kinship with a man who called seeds “a plant’s children” and mothered his ferns for want of offspring of his own. It is a risky hinge — the personal threatening to overrun the scholarly — but her prose is too exact to tip into sentiment. She catches what a botanist would probably miss: that Bose’s records of stimulus are really a “First Information Report” of hurt, and that love — a word one never meets in a scientific tract — was his declared method.

A changed vocabulary

The risk lies elsewhere. Roy writes to see Bose vindicated, and the temptation of every such rescue is to enlist contemporary science’s findings — plants that “cry,” that can be anaesthetised — as a verdict in his favour. What maturing science has done since is swap that vocabulary of sentiment for the plainer grammar of signalling. The tomato that Bose’s heirs would call “frightened” turns out, in a 1992 Nature study, to relay an electrical pulse from a chewed leaf to the rest of the plant, which then manufactures chemicals to see off the caterpillar — a defence circuit, not distress. “Crying” plants emit ultrasonic clicks under stress, not sobs. The field has even demoted itself: the Society for Plant Neurobiology, accused of smuggling a nervous system into the flowerbed, renamed itself the Society for Plant Signalling and Behaviour. Interconnectedness explains in several instances what Victorian science ascribed to human-like intelligence alone.

Bose was no denied genius nursing a grievance. He declined to patent his early radio-wave detector, or the coherer — ideas, he held, should be shared freely — and left to Guglielmo Marconi the commercial glory of wireless without ever waging the priority war that a nationalist school in India still fights on his behalf. His real bequest was a method: that the discovery of nature need not wait on costly infrastructure. His only collaborator was a tinsmith, Putiram Das. His crescograph was little more than needles, clockwork, and smoked glass. From that ethic descends a lineage of Indian science done with string and ingenuity — C.V. Raman splitting light on a shoestring, the cosmic-ray work of Meghnad Saha, Vikram Sarabhai, and Homi Bhabha — before the republic turned to Big Science and reactors.

One of the essays in the collection has Bose telling the story of David Schwarz’s all-metal airship — mocked by the examiners as too heavy to ever leave the ground; of Samuel Langley, who died broken-hearted after his machine fell into the river; and of a Wright brother, who broke his leg mid-flight and simply began again until man could “extend his empire into the blue sky”. The metal balloon is the emblem: the seemingly inert, too-heavy, ridiculed thing, made to rise. This is a parable of daring — that the brave transcend the fear of failure and death. It is Bose defending, by analogy, his own unfashionable pursuit.

The Man Who Made Plants Write: Essays by Jagadish Chandra Bose

Trs Sumana Roy

HarperCollins

₹599

jacob.koshy@thehindu.co.in

Published - August 07, 2026 05:28 pm IST