Plant thinkers of twentieth century bengal
Sumana Roy
oxford university press
Rs.995
Pages 203 pp

All the plant thinkers included in this work evoke an individualistic inti-macy with plant life. They drew freedom, joy, and philosophy in cohabiting with plant havens

In this epoch of the Anthropocene in which the turbulences of climate change are increasingly disrupting lives of millions worldwide, the dynamics of how plant life, forests and vegetation offer a healing option to the environment is moving to centre stage of the global discourse.

At the imminent UN climate summit in New York on October 22, updated national commitments to carbon emission reduction are likely to be made. Outside statistics and logistics of environmental issues humanists are evoking traditional plant lore to wean away people from destroying plant ecology and the tree cover that protects humans and the universe. Contrary to popular belief respect for plant life, woods and forests was a live and vocal issue in Bengal over a century ago.

In this insightful retrospective book, plant enthusiast and academic Sumana Roy brings together comments of physicist Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose who believed that plants are “living things” to Rabindranath Tagore who established the Patha Bhavan ashram school and Viswa-Bharati University at Santiniketan where “trees and the seasons” were the “heart of the cosmogony”. These notables apart, this compendium also provides opinions of artists and cinematographers, writers and poets, novelists and autobiographers, even daily communications with Maya-mashi, an illiterate house help with her oral plant-lore — individuals who, without being conscious ‘environmentalists’ shared habitats, concerns, thoughts, proverbs on ‘plant poetics’.

In this effort to focus on a tradition of “plant thinking” Roy moves towards decolonising the mind — by making her reading of Jagadish Chandra, Rabindranath, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Jibanananda Das, Shakti Chattopadhyay and Satyajit Ray an immersive experience. Rooted in the tactile regional texture of plant varieties and leaves, grass, vegetation, flowers and even weeds, the intense textual analysis of their essays and poems record a history of directly cohabiting and engaging with plant life.

All the plant thinkers included in this work evoke an individualistic intimacy with plant life, a philosophy now on the “verge of extinction”. They drew freedom and joy, philosophy and creative sustenance in cohabiting with plant havens. Roy argues these writers and artists did not use plants merely as metaphors, symbols and ornaments. In their works she discovers that literary history had become ecological history. She traces the beginnings of literary modernism in Bengal to the way in which changing equations with plant life in the 20th century shaped visual and linguistic expression.

Jagadish Chandra Bose believed in an underlying unity amidst the multiplicity of varied phenomena in the natural world, a democratic philosophy he inherited from the Brahmo Samaj. Ignoring Western taxonomy, he conducted fine-tuned experiments that captured agency, response and language in the plant world. A plant speaking for itself was new self-reflexive modernist literary culture.

Likewise Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore was intimately tuned into nature, both in Santiniketan and in Selaidaha, when he sailed on the River Padma to oversee the family’s zamindari holdings. It was however the vision of Rabindranath’s father Debendranath that transformed the denuded land that he had acquired near Bolpur into an arable expanse. His poet-son turned it into a meditative garden with a profusion of trees, flowering plants and creepers — a natural space for leisure and sadhana. The ambience was ideally suited to the ashram experience of empirical study, a “stirring of the mind in the language of plants.”

The next three chapters bring to our notice the fictional repertoire of a novelist and two poets — all writing in Bengal’s charming mother tongue. The close textual readings reconfigure the plant-human equation from perspectives that go beyond literary. For instance, writing about the foregrounding of plant ecology in the opening of Bibhuti Bhushan’s (the novelist’s Pather Panchali was the poignant narrative that Satyajit Ray turned into an iconic film) novel Ichhamati, Roy describes it “a revolutionary formulation of history”. She opines that the history of plant life, its settlement, death and evacuation from spaces “constitute our national history”.

Even as the era of the Anthropocene was on its threshold, Jibanananda Das’ poetry was an ode to the botanical history of provincial Bengal. Influenced by French poet Baudelaire, he explored modernism, the mysteries of life, death and darkness associated with time and timelessness.

All told, the intellectual culture of Bengal of the earlier half of the 20th century was shaped by versatile litterateurs and artists. Satyajit Ray is placed in a family tradition that made the best of a heritage of plant thinking — Brahmo and Vaishnava, folklore and fantasy, whimsical and humorous that “challenges human logic and colonial science”. As film directors, Satyajit and Ritwik Ghatak used a tapestry of evergreen trees, vegetation, in their cinematic frames to comment on a fast changing landscape towards a culture that alienates itself from plant-life.

The conclusive chapter is the poignant tale of Maya Mashi, a sick, neglected and marginalised woman remembered like a tree, even if she likens herself to a weed.

The takeaway from this compendium is a philosophy of vegetal life that raises several ontological questions. It focuses on the concept of ‘plant thinking’ — intuitive, non-cognitive behaviour of plants that highlights temporality, freedom, non-violence, inter-personal interaction. The thinkers featured here have a heritage of human cognition that chronicles changes in the ecological history of Bengal. The obvious limitation of the book is the regional perimeter within which the study confines itself even while it establishes the foundational principles of non-conscious intentionality in the plant world.

Jayati Gupta