Video: The Quest for the Plant Script, a Talk by Author Sumana Roy

THEME MUSIC] SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

SPEAKER 2: The Quest for the Plant Script. Thinking with Plants and Fungi. September 24, 2024.

RACHAEL PETERSEN: So I'm guessing that many of us in this room today are doubtful as to this claim of human exceptionalism. I expect that many of us would feel more than comfortable extending at least some form of language to non-human animals. Dolphins click, whistle, flick their flippers. Primates sign. Bees, do a little wiggle dance to point their friends toward food. But what about plants? Would you submit a red oak into that rarefied domain of language and communication? What about writing?

Contemporary science, of course, is shedding light on the language of plants, a predominantly silent language of shapes, colors and scents. Indeed, one of the primary ways in which plants communicate is through a rich lexicon of organic compounds, which they emit, for example, to discourage predators or attract pollinators. The possibility that plants signify their lives through forms of speech far predates this contemporary science, however. One prominent proponent of this idea was the renowned Indian polymath, Jagadish Chandra Bose, who maintained that plants disclose their largely hidden inner lives through a form of writing he called the Plant Script.

Sadly, Bose remains largely unremembered in many American circles, due in no small part to racism, as well to the ways in which his legacy was distorted by new age associations prompted by the 1973 book The Secret Lives of Plants by Tompkin and Bird. Which is why I'm so thrilled we have Sumana with us here today to excavate Bose's thought, the legacy of his plant script and the profound questions it evokes. Namely, if we want to hear plants speak, which for Bose means to read what plants write, what kind of reading must we resort to and to what sort of writing does it correspond?

How do we translate the lives of plants, and what is lost or gained in this translation? How do we expand the category of language and of writing to arrive at a more primordial sensorial root of symbol, gesture, body, and dream? Sumana Roy is the author of many publications, including, How I Became a Tree, provincials, Postcards from the Peripheries, and V.I.P, Very Important Plant, a collection of poems.

She is an associate Professor of English and creative writing at Ashoka University. Please join me in welcoming her today. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

SUMANA ROY: Thank you, Rachael. I think you've already said everything that I had to say. Thank you to all of you for joining me this evening. To my friends, Aruni, Rita, Shreyashi, Nilanjana. I'm not going to thank my husband. And-- [CHUCKLES] --to Bashaar, who I can't see in the audience now. There. To the Harvard Divinity School. To Matthew for coming here and to all of you. I hope this is the beginning of a new friendship and conversation mediated through plant life.

"There are professors of sciences bordering on the mystical, who declare that they can discriminate the character and disposition of anyone, simply by a careful observation of his handwriting. As to the authenticity of such claims, skepticism is permissible, but there is no doubt that one's handwriting may be modified profoundly by conditions, physical and mental. Such then is the history that may be unfolded to the critical eye by the lines and curves of a human autograph.

Under a placid exterior, there is also a hidden history in the life of the plant. Storm and sunshine, warmth of summer and frost of winter, drought and rain, all these and many more come and go about the plant. What coercion do they exercise upon it? What subtle impress do they leave behind? Is it possible to make the plants write down their own autographs, and thus reveal their hidden history?" This is Jagadish Chandra Bose, the Indian scientist who proved that plants were living beings, and who sought to create conditions for plants to write their own script.

Torulipi, plant script. It's from his book, Abyakta, a collection of essays in Bangla that I have been translating. When new scientific research about plant emotions and plant intelligence became available in March last year, I wanted to get two of Bose's essays published because I began to feel deprived almost in a secondhand manner. Bose had written everything, you know, Matthew, that was now being proved by a scientific world, a scientific community. Essays about a plant's nervous system, plants emotions and intelligence 100 years before these scientific discoveries were being made.

Jagadish Chandra Bose was born in what is Bangladesh today. He went on to study the natural sciences at the University of Cambridge and get his DSC degree from University College London, following which he returned to teach at Presidency College. He would eventually establish the Bose Institute in 1917, where most of his research instruments are still preserved. What Bose was seeking, if you see the part that I have italicized, is it possible to make the plants write down their own autographs and thus reveal their hidden history?

So what Bose was seeking wasn't autograph alone. Through it, he's seeking autobiography, the hidden history, the unsaid, the abyakta of the plants. Only in this plant script will the history of plants be revealed to us in their own handwriting. What he is trying to create, therefore, is, as Rachael said, language, plant language. If a tree corresponds-- sorry. "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 nerves 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 plants? 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, as I said, is from Jagadish Chandra Bose's 1922 Book, Abyakta, all the translations are mine. So to record this plant script, torulipi, Bose would design and create a variety of instruments, some of which I'll show you, the electro optic analog, the shielded lens.

Let me share these with you. These drawings are by Bose reproduced in the book of Abyakta, and therefore, you see them with Bengali annotations. Some of these instruments are the electro optic analog, the shielded lens antenna, the resonant recorder, the vitagraph. This is my favorite. I find this the most moving because this is what he began with, not with the plants, but with the leaf. If it was possible to find a script of the leaf, as it were, and when we return towards work-- not return, but move towards work of say, the last 50 years, we'll see how this is relevant.

The plant vitagraph, the automatic photograph, the bubbler instrument, the plant. I am not sure whether I'm pronouncing this correctly, Sphygmograph, and of course, the most well-- this is the photograph. The most well known among them that all of you would have heard about the crescograph. And he went through different variations of the crescograph.

This book, from which I shared these images with you, was called Abyakta, the unsaid, and the year was 1922. I mentioned the year to state the obvious, the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses, T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, books by Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, the staging of Bertolt Brecht first play. Not to mention the world meeting, Picasso's cubism and Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt, all of which would later lead W.H. Auden in summarizing the age to say that the climate had changed. No list of books from 1922 includes Bose's book, of course.

It's an interesting word to hear 100 years later when climate has moved from being a noun to an adjective. From Auden's literary or intellectual climate to the doom of climate change, Bose, though wasn't using the word. Its utilitarian usage would have put him off, as would have it summarizing instinct. His ambition was different. He would let the plants speak for themselves. He would be a mere facilitator. He would design instruments that would record their language. 100 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 out his experiments. Aware of the skepticism and suspicion surrounding his research, Bose wrote this to his friend, Rabindranath Tagore.

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. This is in 1899. But what exactly had brought him to the plant sciences? He had begun life as a physicist, after all. There is folklore about jagadish Chandra Bose stepping accidentally on the lojjaboti, the mimosa or mimosa pudica. The touch me not. Meaning the shy one.

And surprised by the folding of its leaves, deciding to find out more about plant behavior, their responses and ways of communication. While we consider the ambition, design and results of his botanical research, we must also allow ourselves to take account of the ecosophical culture that indulged this thinking. More than a decade after that letter, two months before the start of the First World War, Bose was giving a talk about plant autographs and their revelations to the Royal Institution of Great Britain.

Bose's interest, in my understanding of his work, has always been with the nature of life about its language. What constitutes the living? Response is an important category in the Bose universe. It is a mark of the living. We are alive because we can respond. That is why the script or handwriting is important to Bose. It is a manifestation of response. He understands it as the claim of the living to argue in language, to argue in writing, in script. And so he begins his talk, as I did, with the science of handwriting.

It is pertinent that he characterizes this approach through a word that could be said to be at the other end of the scientific. The word he uses is mysticism, with its character of unquantifiability. What Bose is seeking, therefore, is not autograph alone. Through it, he is seeking autobiography. The hidden history, the unsaid, the abyakta of the plants. Writing this during the high tide of modernism, when the autobiography was becoming the most interesting site for experiments in writing and art, and also an entry point for those who had been kept out of literature and culture by gatekeepers, this urge for both the autograph and autobiography of the plant seems natural, at least the literary and cultural world, if not in the sciences.

The sciences tell us someone's story. We learn about animals, about objects, about metals, about the elements, about the stars, and of course, about plants. Bose is signaling for a move from literature about them. A world available to us only in reports and paraphrase to a directness that has been denied to everyone besides those who have had no agency to speak to humans in a shared language. What he is trying to create, therefore, is plant language.

And I like to think, if you allow me, I like to think of Bose as a Subaltern-- sorry, as part of the Subaltern Project before this creation or the official creation of the Subaltern Studies Project, as it were. He's thinking of the plant as the Subaltern. To know the real-- and this is why I say this. "To know the real history of plants, we must go to the plants themselves. That history is mysterious and complicated. To retrieve that history, machines will have to record every moment of a plant's life from birth to death. The script will have to be written by the plant itself, and it must have the plant's autograph.

This is because men are often deceived by their motive." I love this. However well intentioned we might be, it's almost like confirmation bias, as it were. Injury startles every living creature. That contraction, so this, the ouch, that contraction is life's response. The response of the living. When one is in the fullness of life, the response is the highest in degree. In a moment of exhaustion, the response is feeble. There is none after death. There is compression in a plant when it is hurt. But it is so little that we are most often unable to see it.

An instrument will amplify this compression and record it as the plant script. The only hurdle for this is the extremely low intensity of the plant's response. One that the instrument is often unable to script. Its blade comes to a stop. To circumvent this, I was successful in reinventing a flat plane instrument. If two violins are tuned to exactly the same sur, if a string in one of them is stroked, the string in the other will also create a Shankar.

I have not translated the word Shankar purposely because you get this onomatopoetic sound in it. "In the plant script instrument, the iron wires inside and outside it are tuned to the same sur. Imagine this, that both the wires tremble 100 times per second. If the external wire is played, the internal wire will move 100 times. And the blade will draw 100 dots. This is how the constant friction with the blade can be avoided. The transcript will record even the finest movement of the plant. This is because the difference between the one dot and the next is only a second."

This, as I said, was in 1922, 100 years ago. The quest for the plant script has continued. And it is this, this desire to discover the language of plants that defines our zeitgeist of the last 100 years. What is it saying about us? It wasn't Jagadish Bose alone who was searching for a plant script. Rabindranath Tagore, who called Jagadish Bose his first friend, was trying to understand [NON-ENGLISH] bhaasha, the language of flowers.

What is this language of flowers, and why does Tagore turn to it as a metaphor to hold the lack of understanding of the ways of the mind? [NON-ENGLISH] or blooming is the foreign language that Tagore wants us to understand or himself understand. This is from a song that some of you will recognize. "Every day, the flowers bloom in your garden. Why don't you feed their honey to my bee like mind? Tagore wants to understand the language of indifference by contrasting it with the language of favoritism, of blessing and inclusion. All other beings are blessed by your attention. Why not me then?"

He begins his song with the language of flowers and ends it with the same. "You fill the flowers with fragrance." There's the curiosity about the language of plants. His acknowledgment that their unique form and fragrance are their language. His desire to understand both their lang and parole and the impossibility of doing so. We find a record of both the frustration of not being able to learn this language and the acknowledgment of the superiority of the language of flowers in a poem that he titles, [NON-ENGLISH], making flowers bloom.

Let me paraphrase this poem. "None of you will be able to make the flowers bloom. No matter what you say or how hard you try. Whether you lift it up day and night or endure its stalk, you won't be able to make it bloom. You might make it look faded or pale by staring at it constantly. Even if the noise and chaos you create might force its mouth open, you won't be able to take its color or rid it of its scent. The one who can make the flowers bloom, he only looks at them.

As soon as the rays from his eyes touch their stalks, it's almost like a mantra. He, only he can make flowers bloom. His breath makes the flowers want to fly. The leaves become wings. They want to crawl on air. All the colors that bloom like the soul's eagerness. It is as if they are calling someone with their scent. He can, only he can make the flowers bloom." Tagore goes to this language like an untrained linguist. What is it that leads to expression, whether as the oral or the written?

Imparting that understanding of communication as reaction and response and intuition that he, of course, shares with his friend Jagadish Bose. He locates the trigger of this language, like the scientists did in light. But he also goes beyond that in locating the personality of the intelligence that has created this script. He is seeking both author and intention. "What kind of language is this? Mother tongue or father tongue? Where there is flower, there will be plucking. Is that part of its language too? This intuition of pollinator, this other possible end to its life, like its transition to fruit is?"

Here is Tagore. He says, "I've made a mistake in plucking the flowers for the sake of my love. My bride, how will I bind you in my sweet bond? This conscientiousness about plucking flowers, about the sense of it being a mistake, even if it is a retrospective awareness, what is its equivalent in language besides perhaps it being ungrammatical to life? Language is, of course, not a valve, there is as much speaking as there is listening. How do flowers listen? Can flowers listen at all?" Tagore introduces an unexpected line of reasoning.

"A language of the bee that only the rose will understand or will at last-- or will at least understand better. A secret language whose meanings are only for a very limited and private listener. Is such language a code meant for only specific readers then? In all these songs and poems, I noticed the same impulse to understand the flower script or language, as it were, sometimes as bee, occasionally, as other pollinators. Flowers are very talkative. They're always in the middle of some manner of conversation."

In a song, the flower says that it is blessed to fall on the Earth, declares that I was-- that service for God is its home. I was born in the dust. Forgive me for that, and so on. Tagore seems to imply this also as a form of communication. The falling of the flowers, their service to the creator in a very Hindu spirit, as it were, and then the downcast eyes of the creator and the concomitant shaking of the branches. "Why flowers must fall to the Earth? Why that must be part of its language? As if it were the inevitable period in a sentence."

How that looks in a plant script is a recurring thought in Tagore. As if the falling of flowers must imply something more in [NON-ENGLISH], a song from the [INAUDIBLE] section of Gitabitan Rabindranath's book of songs. "The life of the flower is seen as one of devotion and dedication and its falling, consequently, a thing of melancholy.

It's a very moving situation. For the flower, a creature indulged by daylight to turn up at night, to be turned down by the night, all because its language or communication is with light, not its opposite the night. It feels like having arrived into a foreign language." Blooming and falling, these are the two poles between which Rabindranath situates this plant language. It is not very different from the parenthesis we use to mark the arrival and departure of a human citizen.

In a song addressed to the shiuli flower, your favorite flower, Aruni, that gives Bengal's autumn its peculiar scent, he, after recording his wonder about the power of the night, its lack of light that produces this fragrance, asks

[SPEAKING HINDI]

In which language do you want us to say goodbye? He, like his friend Jagadish, wants the flowers to respond, whether it's asking them for the language of preference in which to hear goodbyes or their names. In song after song, we find the recurring use of the phrase [SPEAKING HINDI], the foreign flower. How then do we read the language of non-flowering in this flower linguistics, if you allow me to coin this phrase?

Through this language, he, like his friend, is also seeking [SPEAKING HINDI], a history of flowers. In a conversation between a honey collector and a flower, Rabindranath seems to imply that the human and the wind are monolingual. They speak in a language that the flower has to understand, but they have not bothered to understand the flowers language. They cannot see that the flower has exhausted itself through its generosity, that it is wilting, that it has nothing left in it to give any more, not even to itself.

The death of the flower is the death of language, is the loss of language. The human does not, the human cannot understand the language of flowers, their codes, their semiotic, their index, their language of consent-- their lack of consent. It is a compulsive tick in writers to hear things in quotation marks, direct speech. When I hear Rabindranath, I sometimes wonder whether he saw the blooming of flowers as direct speech. Flowers as beings whose expressions must exist inside quotes.

He, of course, doesn't say this anywhere. These are my slightly wayward thoughts. Almost as an aside, I want to share with you this page from the artist Nandalal Bose lessons for his students. Nandalal Bose was an art teacher and a very well known artist from the Bengal School of Art in Shantiniketan, the University that Rabindranath Tagore founded or established.

And here in this book, which the artist K.G. Subramaniam translates, what we see-- And Nandalal Bose did not write any book. These were lectures collected by his students. And you find in these sketches that he's very often turning to plant life for an analogical imagination, as it were. So if he has to draw the human ears, he points to the scars-- what is called-- what Leonardo da Vinci called scars, in these trees, these circular patterns that we have on the trunk of trees.

Here he's trying to teach his students how to draw the different or these nine art emotions, the nine rasas of the Rasa Theory. So shringar or beauty and love, disgust, anger, wonder, peace and so on. I find it extraordinary that Nandalal Bose, Tagore's contemporary, Bose's contemporary, turns to the language from the plant world of flowers, of leaves, of branches, as using a kind of-- to create almost the likeness of a plant script for these human emotions, as it were.

Many of you will be familiar with this poem by E.E. Cummings. It's called A Leaf Falls with Loneliness. This is how he kind of-- I'll talk about this in a bit. All of you, all of us, have seen leaves falling, fortunately. Leaves do not, and we know that leaves do not fall like raindrops. There is no discernible order. Not one leaf will fall like the other. It is as if even in falling the leaves want to retain their signature. Their autograph.

I didn't mean to use the word signature. It just came to me. For it feels like this, leaves falling from the same tree, but differently. As if it is not just the moment of birth. That marks our uniqueness, that we should be different in our death as well. E.E. Cummings tried to find the emotion in the script of the falling of a leaf in this script, in this poem. See the word-- [INAUDIBLE].

A leaf falls with loneliness. And yet in this script, we find it in company. Sometimes one letter, sometimes two, even three. This one particularly ironic for it has the word one. But the number of letters in that particular line is three. There are many L's in the poem. They are the inaugural sounds of both leaf and loneliness. When they fall in company, they are alone, lonelier than they were on a branch. That is why E.E. Cummings' poem is a deconstructed branch. The leaves are together, but they are not connected by any glue, such as the branch, almost the way letters are and are not in an alphabet.

It is interesting that Cummings turns to the last phase of a leafs life when he thinks of a planned script. Though, of course, he does not use the word. Octavio Paz does the same. His poem is titled Coda. "Perhaps to love is to learn to walk through this world, to learn to be silent like the oak and the lindle of the fable, to learn to see your glance scattered seeds. It planted a tree. I talk because you shake its leaves."

Paz borrows a few things from human language. First, the oral, silence. To learn to be silent like the oak and the linden of the fable. After silence, which we know is, of course, the first letter, invisible though it is, of any alphabet. Then the dispersal of sound. In that silence, your glance scattered seeds. And then that unforgettable sentence, I talk because you shake its leaves. The movement from silence to speech, mediated as it is through plant life, ends with the shaking of leaves.

In E.E. Cummings poem, the falling of leaves created a script of loneliness. In Paz, it is dialogue. One talks, the other shakes its leaves. Another plant script. The analogical imagination about the language of plants is older, as Rachael said, than the written script. It is perhaps for this reason that when the script emerges, particularly the page and binding, languages begin reflecting this. What else can explain why the Bangla word for leaf and page are the same, patta?

Similarly with Hindi, pana derives from the Sanskrit purna, meaning leaf. In [SPEAKING HINDI], trees speak, which I have translated from the Bengali poet, Shakti Chattopadhyay, he writes, "I sit inside the tree morning and evening. I water every tree, the tree gives me fruit in return. This give and take continues in gentle, unspoken love. Tree and man understand this love, no one else does. I sit inside the tree morning and evening. Not everyone is a tree, there are weeds too.

They have to be plucked out with some strength, a little care. The trees live happily. To be able to live happily the trees look at them with indifference. It hurts to pluck out weeds, they too bear flowers. They might not be upper castes like the sunflower or the Jasmine, but even then, they have squatted in our garden with love. Without our giving water, they're giving us flowers of so many shapes and colors. So that trees can thrive and live happily, we pluck out weeds. I sit inside the tree, morning and evening.

A few thoughts about plant language here. The need to sit inside a tree to be able to understand its language better. The need to sit there morning and evening when it is watered. A form of close reading that is predicated on reciprocity and response." The poet wants us to notice the weeds that give us flowers even without our watering them. And in doing so, exist outside the expected script of response. The human's response to these flowers in this dialogue is weeding.

What we are being given, even if only in the likeness of a model, is the difference in the character of two kinds of scripts. One that flowers through serve and volley, watering and flowering, The other, through neglect. Is weeding a form of writing, of scripting? Is it akin to erasure of striking out, of wiping out with an eraser? A script is a living thing. I repeat this cliché only to emphasize that it is only the living that can have a script. It's interesting then to discover that so many poets have spent their creative and speculative energy on imagining the likeness of a plant script without using that phrase often.

In the final stages of a plant's life, particularly the falling leaf, this is a poem by-- I don't know whether I'm pronouncing her name correctly. Ada Limon or Limón. This is a her poem. Instructions on Not Giving Up. For want of time, I'm not going to read the poem with you, but I'd request you to sprint to the last two lines of this poem. "I'll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I'll take it All."

So, so long. We've been looking at the falling leaf as a kind of plant script. The obverse of this kind of script is the new slick leaf unfurling like a fist to an open palm. It does feel like a miracle, doesn't it? How it emerges from hiding. At first, a pixel of green, gradually growing into a bubble and then a spire. All of these in miniature and then into something like cloth, a slight curl or wave, as if responding to an invisible history of time, trauma and tentativeness. There is more surprise in the leaf script than in the scripts of buds and flowers.

The bureaucracy of budding and blooming, necessary as they are to the continuation of the life of a species, is a bit like passing an examination. One must write within the margins. With leaves, the script is freer. With leaves, we see a script like we see letters of an alphabet, a community, a neighborhood, a Hamlet, a joint family living together, but also separately. Hence the greening, the green skin, the patience and the plodding in this poem.

In April 2023, nearly 2000-- so in April 2023, that's exactly 100 years after the publication of Bose's book or Abyakta. In April 2023, nearly 2000 years of the urge to find the language of plants was collected by Katie Holten, in her book, The Language of Trees, A Rewilding of Literature and Landscape. The book begins with what Holten calls a trees typeface, a rewilding tool. On the left page is the tree alphabet, its name almost a continuation of a quest that began with Bose's plant script, Torulipi.

Holten, an artist and also an editor and writer, has chosen a tree, more specifically, its shape for each letter of the alphabet. As you can see, I'm not going to read out. This is in front of you. So A for apple, beech, cedar, dogwood, elm, and so on. Holten does not choose a for apple because it is easy and obvious, like it is, for instance, in ours, in the books that we supply to children.

She chooses it for its form, for the visual resemblance between the structure of a generic apple tree and the letter A. Turning a private manner of seeing into a very public typeface. Holten is an artist, Bose was a scientist. Bose's understanding of this language was through response, which is how plants and indeed our muscles and bones find form. Holten is recording form as well, but their positions on the arc are different.

Bose wants to the reason, Holten records without questions. Bose wanted to see this as autobiography and by extension, history, plant history. Holten with her eyes on effect, not cause, records the bones of what she sees. The Roman script on the right page, the tree script on the left. Crowded when it's a long excerpt, almost analogous to a forest, spaced out when it's a single sentence excerpt, almost like a park hedge.

My favorite page is the tree alphabet version of the page of contents. So I'm just sharing one with you. This is what these pages look like. Seeds, soil, saplings, buds, bark branches and so on. After noticing the obvious division of the book into its constituents as if it were a tree, evidence of a heightened, analogous imagination between the human and the plant that marks our times, I myself am guilty of this in my book, How I Became a Tree, you notice the language, the alliterations, seeds, soil, saplings, buds, bark, branches, flower, fruits, forests, family, trees, roots, resistance and so on.

And you wonder whether this poetic device that has been used-- been in use for millennia could actually be the language of trees. Something else caught my attention. The use of and the way it exists on our keyboard, for instance, in flowers and fruits, roots and resistance. Holten uses a tree form for and that does not belong to the tree alphabet, that she has created. It resembles the shape of a V.

A tree trunk connecting two branches like the conjunction in a sentence does. Does plant life know the conjunction? Where can we locate the and in the form of a tree? Unlike Rabindranath, I went to the leaves. To identify every kind, every type of leaf as a letter of the alphabet, requires a very willed imagination. I think at first it was the heart shaped leaves. Hearts for leaves. Tiny, tiny hearts crawling up a stem. Sometimes it seems that they mimic the raindrops. They remain close to the Earth like little people, unambitious for height, distrustful of the vertical.

They will take over any place that is given to them. They are like the heart, which can accommodate everything and everyone. Hearts whose chambers we cannot see, hearts connected by string like stems, so many of them, light green when young, maturing into a darker color when older, the opposite of human hair, which goes lighter as we age. When hung in pots, they pour out of it in abundance so that from a distance they might resemble a leaking pot with water sprinting out of it.

I collected them when they dried or when birds tore the stems and left them behind. Since it was the shadows of the tiny hearts on the walls that had at first seemed like a script, a script whose meaning we were still trying to decipher, it was to them I went. Quoting its dead branches and leaves with black watercolor paint, I pressed them on white paper. But I'm not the sun, my pressure is not weightless like light. If a plant is exposed to sunlight unequally, it will reveal itself in the differences in shape and color.

But even as I tried my best to distribute pressure and my weight equally on the paint coated plant, the results were disastrous. I mean, they were just wrong. The script was more a record of both my body and mind than it was the plants. If the plant had wanted to write, it would have. Why was I like a parent or a bad school teacher forcing the script on a species, on a world, which had neither any urge nor use for it? But I was stubborn and I was restless, having no training in making art, I had no idea about waiting time.

I moved the books under which I had placed the paint soaked plant. What had I expected? Why had I expected to see something resembling shadows of these plants? What I had instead was something like a sea beach full of footprints or an ant trail or crows on an electric wire. It is only now that I see that my first spontaneous comparisons were with animals. The leaves had had no desire to write. I was only trying to record their form, the way an ink pad smeared fingerprint is a record of my finger. Was my finger? Are you your finger? Was the page filled with my fingerprints, my personal alphabet of 10 letters?

Why then was I taking the form of the leaves to be a script? How was one to read it, left to right, right to left, top to bottom, bottom to top? What? As I tried to record or imagine the plant script, I began to notice the arbitrariness of our language systems. Who had decided on these orders of looking and observing? Should I look at a tree from its roots to the top or top down? There was another reason for the confusion. The impress of the leaves both looked and did not look like a script. By script, I am therefore thinking of something that has emerged from the human.

There was also something else, the patterns on the piece of paper, and I find it hard to say this, were actually analogous to a death mask. In other words, the script was a death certificate. The leaves had been dead. Its movements, a thing of the past. This wasn't a record of response, which is how I understand language. A serve and volley between our circumstances and ourselves, moving as we often do between the registers of uh-huh and ouch.

My experiments were childish. Or if I have to be a bit more generous to myself, a bit like a child's drawing the letters of an unfamiliar alphabet. Letting the leaves and branches dry, picking them up from places, coloring them, pressing them on paper. It did not take me very long to realize or come to accept that mine was actually a dead script. I tried not to blame myself, for I had tried to let living leaves and branches leave their impress on white paper.

Apart from the fact that it felt like I was asphyxiating them by dipping them in color, even if it was watercolor, there was the problem of dimension. It was impossible to reduce living forms onto the flatness of paper. This made me wonder about the idea of script itself. How can a script, any script, hold my being in it? Language and script are living things. When it is not alive, we find the cliché, dead language. Was this a plant cliché then? Even if it was, it certainly wasn't the plant's cliché.

I had to suppress my proclivities. No, the response of plant life to spring wasn't the equivalent of an exclamation mark. Neither was a fallow period of non flowering a period. Punctuations derived far too much from the human body. Its reflexes and reserve. The anatomy of plants was different. Language, all kinds of language. The script, drawing, music, numbers was inevitably and compulsively synecdoche.

It is impossible to think of plant functioning in terms of the grammar of the synecdoche, the part for the whole. I had tried with living plants and branches. There is a disobedience in the form that doesn't commit to two-dimensionality, which is, after all, what the script is. That is why shadows are not our reflections. I became, by Plato's indictment, twice removed from the truth when I started taking photos of the shadows.

I have no reason to offer. Why did I think of plant shadows as script when I had never imagined my own shadow or the shadows of animals as our script? I feel embarrassed. What was I trying to understand as form, the anatomy? It was silly, of course, and yet it was impossible to deny this urge to find a shared grammar of existence for what else is language. I tried to check, sometimes, whether the raindrops fell similarly on humans. Humans and plants get wet unequally. I had to pause the thought.

There were others who were looking for other plant scripts to read. Scientists were now reading plant rings to study the history of pollution like Sylvia Plath had found the history of winters soaked and seeped into this script once. Please note is the "IN" sound in this. "The wet dawn inks are doing their blue dissolve. On their blotter of fog the trees seem a botanical drawing. Memories growing, ring on ring. A series of weddings." It's almost replicating that circularity that we understand gives us the tree's age.

The urge to hear from the other side and not about the other side has changed the idea of the plant script. Like, it was Bose's impulse to discover the language of plants themselves. For want of time, this is Isabel Hofmeyr's work. I don't have time. I'll just go to something which is-- it's not a script, but a record of plant language, as it were. I think many of you will be familiar with his work. It's David George Haskell, who has made scientific investigations with the improvisatory instinct of an artist. Will you help me? Recording sounds inside tree trunks.

So I don't need to add any preface. You will see that this is-- all of these are in time lapse. So this is the sound, as David says, the twig is full of water at midnight. High notes then shrinks after sunrise as water starts to flow and draws the twig inward. Last, the twig rehydrates in the evening and early nighttime. So this is a 16 second kind of condensation of the twigs life of drinking water.

[BEEPING]

Sorry.

[PIANO MUSIC]

There is a lot of humor in these recordings. Imagine yourself growing fatter, if there was to be a recording of that. So this is what David does. In this, the twig is adding new wood each day, getting wider, and this is the sound of getting wider.

[PIANO MUSIC]

I'll play one last one. Number 4. The roots of a palm tree on the beach experience. I recorded this with a hydrophone, David says. So you can read this. And the palm was felled by a spring tide shortly after this.

[WATER SOUNDS]

It's almost like the palm tree drinking water, isn't it?

The plant script exists, only that we are still illiterate, even though we are like kindergarten children who believe that every scribble and every line is a letter in the alphabet. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

RACHAEL PETERSEN: Thank you so much, Sumana. I am really appreciating that you wove into this your own story of the quest for the plant script. Because that's something that we try to keep alive in our reading group and in this Initiative as sort of if we take these conversations seriously, how would we live differently or how can I go in search of plant intelligence or the plant script. So I'm appreciating that you kind of shared with us a lived experience of that and the frustration that can come with that.

I'll kick things off with one question, and then we'll leave the rest of time for everyone here in the room. I was really struck in that story by this exasperated comment that you made. "If the plant wanted to write, it would have." And I was thinking about that in the context of Bose's approach to the plant script, which is highly mediated, and you might even say coercive, right? You could say it's relational, coercive. I'm curious how you characterize that.

Did he have any sense that plants wanted to write, that they wanted to be known or was it a more coercive kind of relationship? How would you characterize that?

SUMANA ROY: Thank you, Rachael, for this question. I was hoping someone would ask. I didn't have time to address this post. Bose was aware of this and just tried to come to Bose through my own interest in him. So I might have shared this with some of you in private that I used to teach in a college where we had staff room meetings among teaching faculty, and there was a physics professor who quite obviously didn't like me. And I remember him saying that you are like Jagadish Chandra Bose, [SPEAKING HINDI] which means, you are mad about plants.

And then as if that wasn't enough, and then he gave me the reason. It's because like Bose, you do not have biological children of your own. And until then I did not have this information about Bose. And I began going-- I mean, I almost sprinted to his research papers where I was surprised to discover a person who is unabashedly human as a scientist. He refuses to wear the surgeon's coat and keep away his emotions, away from the lab, as it were.

The fact that this had been-- his interest in plant life had been triggered by this chance encounter. It's the subject of folklore in Bose studies, as it were, of his stamping or stomping or trampling on the touch me not, as it were. Reading his writings, I discovered that through many of these research papers, not just in English, but more particularly in Bangla, whether he's writing for children or for a more adult readership. he likens plants to children, to infants.

So a tiny sapling, he would notice the mouth of this infant, as it were. Then he writes-- he did not have biological children of his own, would leave the Bose Institute, which he founded or established to his nephew, and now it's run by the government of India, as it were. But when he writes about this nephew who has a fever when he's little, he's likening the nephew, a pigeon which visits the nephew, and plant life in the same register of infancy, as it were.

Much later, in one of these essays that I have been translating, he says teachers in Bengal might have been successful in sending very indisciplined schoolboys to the high court as lawyers by pulling their ears. Like this in a corporal punishment, as it were. But you can do the same to plants, and he realized. He says, I have made a mistake here. All the experiments that I conducted have been under stress. So his response or the idea of creating the plant script, what is this plant script? It is the response of plants to external stimuli.

What are these external stimuli? Not kissing the plant, as it were, but heat, extreme heat, extreme cold, electricity, all of these to discover or confirm that these plants had a nervous system, as it were. So he was aware of this coercion, and he, therefore, became very aware of the fact that his was a very limited script. If it was language at all, it was a language of pain, as you say, of coercion, and that is why I wanted to share with you, Nandalal Bose-- it is a full-- much more fuller register of emotions.

And in this, there is no coercion. These are branches or leaves that have been picked by his students in Shantiniketan, and he tries to show-- if you want to show an angry person, this is how you draw the eyebrow or the nose of that person, as it were. And what you said about bringing my own self, well, someone like you might see it as a necessity, something I do as well, I know there is a lot of hesitation and reluctance. We are sitting in a University space, after all, where there is such a lot of suspicion about the eye that rights and the eye that experiences.

I am not-- I am embarrassed about many things, but I am not embarrassed about the eye that experiences because I am not a scientist, I am not an academic. My first archive is myself. And so I go to the plant life mediated through to the limited perimeter of this archive. Only to be able to experience other larger archives in turn.

RACHAEL PETERSEN: That was beautiful. I feel like I want to print that last part on a poster and hang it somewhere in Harvard. "I'm not ashamed of the eye that experiences." I'd like to open it up-- for the sake of time, I would like to open it up for questions. OK, yes?

AUDIENCE: Thank you so much. I learned so much from the talk. And so I'm wondering if there might be any Baul influence on the plant language in Bengal. Just given since Rabi Thakur preserved the songs of Lalon in these notebooks, and I was thinking that they often mention this kind of play on flower, [NON-ENGLISH] and fruit like [NON-ENGLISH] and just out of my own ignorance, not knowing much about Jagadish Chandra Bose, I'm wondering, did he similarly encounter these songs or is there any evidence that he was around any kind of Baul milieu or something? Thank you.

SUMANA ROY: That's such a lovely question. Lovely, because unexpected. He would have been familiar with these songs because Rabindranath calls Jagadish Chandra Bose, [SPEAKING HINDI], my first friend. They were very close friends. I'm not sure about records. I don't have records of Jagadish Chandra Bose visiting Rabindranath in Shantiniketan, where the directness of encounter with the Bose would have been more probable.

But he was always visiting Rabindranath in Shilaidaha when Rabindranath was staying on the River Padma or Podda in a houseboat. We get to know of this through Rathindranath, Rabindranath's son, in his very moving memoir, where he writes that he would conduct, Jagadish Bose would conduct these experiments and every-- there was no idea of the weekend. The weekend is an American invention, I think. But would come visit them every Friday. He was with his father and the barter economy that was happening was, to think of it 100 years later, I find it so affectionate and moving.

So Jagadish Bose would tell them about his new research with plant life, and in turn, he had to be bribed with a new short story that Rabindranath would write every week. So Rathindranath writes about these stories that, Runi, we were talking about the other day that would become golpo guccho, the collection of stories. And the pressure, imagine, on Rabindranath to produce a short story every week, as it were, it's such a beautiful barter in that sense.

Rabindranath was obviously influenced by the black Bauls. And the instrument that the Bauls play, also owes to plant life, as you know that very often, it's a hollowed out gourd. And some of these songs, they do reference plant life, not just in the way that I might have presented it here, but the magic, the magical and the fantastical quality of plant life that some of these Bauls were writing about from their unique, and I emphasize the word unique here, from their unique experience of community in the way that they were living.

It's almost an extra social life, as it were. And Shakti Chattopadhyay-- because you mentioned the Bauls-- Shakti Chattopadhyay, whose poem I shared with you in a very poor translation by me, of sitting inside the tree, he was very influenced by the Bauls. He in fact, died in Shantiniketan. Towards the end of his life, he had managed-- he had a very difficult working life. He was unable to hold jobs for a long period of time. He was a very extra social person in that sense.

Towards the end of his life, he managed to get a job as a creative writing person in Tagore's University and was spending a lot of time with the Bauls, therefore. But this would be 100 years after Rabindranath. But the similarity between the Bauls and Shakti Chattopadhyay is this, that he was very influenced by the extra social character of their lives. Their refusal to conform to the very conservative human social. And lots of Baul music owe their origin to sitting under a tree and composing, as it were. So the idea of the social is very different there.

The idea of the cage is very-- the idea of the cage, that the Bauls turn to over and over again is the human social. They try to break it. So the idea of wanting to live like a bird. So the idea of the bird, the idea of the plant, of fruiting, of flowering, of blossoming, of falling, all of these are part of their emotional lexicon. I agree with you.

RACHAEL PETERSEN: Other questions? Yeah, great.

SUMANA ROY: I'm scared because she's going to ask me a question from Bangla literature.

AUDIENCE: No, not at all. It's actually-- I mean, thank you so much for your talk. And I learnt a lot, as I always do, listening and reading you.

SUMANA ROY: Thank you.

AUDIENCE: So my question is coming from my own interest in children's literature and the philosophy of childhood. And it relates to what you started saying in your previous response about Bose thinking of plants as children. So this is also the time where a language of writing for children is evolving in Bangla. And Bose definitely writes for children. His writings are published in children's magazines.

And Tagore is also thinking about the philosophy of childhood. And then he has his own primer, which is illustrated by--

SUMANA ROY: Nandalal.

AUDIENCE: --Nandalal. And he uses the sonic-- the sonic idea of alliteration and the visual--

SUMANA ROY: Yes.

AUDIENCE: --brings it in his primer. So I just wanted to pick your brain about this language for writing for children and how they are thinking about plant life and whether there is a correlation.

SUMANA ROY: Thank you. I'll go back to a text that you know better than I do, which is the introduction that he writes-- that Rabindranath writes to god--

AUDIENCE: [SPEAKING HINDI]

SUMANA ROY: [SPEAKING HINDI]

AUDIENCE: [SPEAKING HINDI]

SUMANA ROY: [SPEAKING HINDI] It's a text you think of almost every day. And so there, if you remember, and I know you do, he's talking about language. And before this, he was sending his wife, his cousins, his sisters, his nieces to the countryside to-- basically to provincial Bengal to collect stories, as it were.

Because it also came from a kind of resistance to colonialism that the idea of what he understands as Bangla and what he would in turn make modern, the language, or modernize in that sense, that it would be lost if children, as they were doing at that time, were to read storybooks written only in the English language.

And for this, we would need to go-- his idea of Bengal comes from there, from the province, as it were. And he's talking about language constantly. What I like from there, Titash, is the idea that he rejects the idea of the father tongue. It might sound-- it might not help us in our age of political correctness to think of that as why he thinks of the folktales, we're talking about a book, which is like a collection of grandma's tales in Bengal that many of us grew up on. The illustrations there too.

I think he rejects the idea of the father tongue, not only because he thinks of the father tongue as deriving from this colonial English that had been imposed on us, but on an eye-- on a language that is predicated on bureaucracy, on seriousness, on official encounters, of formal documents, as it were. And he thinks that children need to be protected from this, as it were.

So even when Upendrakishore and Sukumar Ray take it up, they too are rejecting this idea of the language, of language, as it were. Jagadish Bose, when he's writing for children, and as you know, he wrote the first science fiction story. It's called Palatak Tufan, isn't it? It's been translated in various ways. I think two or three translations exist. There is no speaking down to children. The language that Jagadish Bose uses to speak to children is a language of spiritual philosophy.

And it derives from, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, Titash, it derives from his very upanishadic idea of life, of life existing in different spaces. That I think he inherits quite naturally from the Brahmo Samaj, and that he then wants to import to a scientific idea of understanding. I think he's extraordinary in that sense, or maybe he's a person of his times, that he refuses to see science as religion and as binaries.

They exist in the same space. So when he gives the founding-- what is it called, the founders speech in 1917, probably when he's establishing the Bose Institute, he calls it a temple. And it doesn't seem to bother him. And it's a language which, because it is so unapologetic, because it is a language so far from the correctness of academia, more a living language that one would get or inherit from mothers and grandmothers and from the domestic space, it survives and flourishes and flowers through these little children that he's writing for.

RACHAEL PETERSEN: I was so surprised to read his disparagement of mystical thinking, because I know that many people have disparaged him as mystical.

SUMANA ROY: Mumbo Jumboism.

RACHAEL PETERSEN: We can have a day long symposium about the way that word is deployed. But when I read his book, Plant Autobiography, which I highly recommend if you haven't, he's the most lyric, beautiful, like, there is a deeply spiritual inflection to the way he describes science.

SUMANA ROY: Yeah.

RACHAEL PETERSEN: And I-- yeah, it's definitely of its time and, I think, disparaged today still. Yeah.

SUMANA ROY: So there is a record of the editors of the Scientific American around that time. So the Scientific American, Matthew, you would know, they ran an issue I think four or five years ago apologizing to a dead Bose that they had suppressed his research and called it Mumbo Jumbo. You know that work as well, Rachael. And so the only support, I think, that he got in earnest manner was from Germany. A little bit from England.

Though he did not accept his salary from presidency college, where he got a job after he returned from England because they were paying him half the salary that they were to a British lecturer. And he did not take a-- he did not draw a salary for three years. He insisted on getting an equal pay and he did. So he was a forefather or an ancestor for us in that sense.

RACHAEL PETERSEN: I suspect that we have questions in the Zoom. Is that--

SPEAKER 3: We do.

RACHAEL PETERSEN: Oh, wonderful. Sure, read them. Yeah, go for it.

SPEAKER 3: First one is from Farheen. He says, I'm a visual artist working on a project about the medicine and sacred use of rose in India and here on the west coast of Canada. Roses are known to be heart medicine, some say, they help ease the heart and transform anger to forgiveness. Question one of two. What do you think roses are speaking, and how does their essence/voice open our hearts? And then two, any writings you know about rose language and script? And I have another follow up question to this as well.

SUMANA ROY: This you said is Farheen?

SPEAKER 3: Correct.

SUMANA ROY: Hi, Farheen. Will you write to me at sumana, S-U-M-A-N-A-0-0-1 @gmail.com please. The rose has been a very difficult flower to kind of smuggle into Hindu iconography because it was considered a videshi phool, a foreign flower, because the Persians were supposed to have got it into India. I'm not sure about this, but for instance, I remember my grandmother every Thursday when she would worship the goddess Laxmi, sometimes when we would go to my father's village and she would ask us to pluck flowers for her.

We would obviously choose-- there was a rose garden and we would pluck rose and she would never give the rose and she would call it-- she would never offer the rose to her gods and goddesses. She would say, it's videshi phool. And I don't know how much of that is true. She never went to school. All her education is in this very folk tradition. But I have heard of the rose being called a videshi phool or a folk flower about medicinal uses.

I have a book to recommend. Please do write to me. It's a book that just came out, I think, earlier this year or last year. I'd be happy to share a PDF with you.

SPEAKER 3: One more question from Amy. We have. Thank you for this fabulous talk and conversation. I'm wondering if we are making an assumption when differentiating human language from plant language. That human language is based in written and spoken language at all. I'm wondering if theories of effect or affect, excuse me, and chemical inscription may link human communication with chemical and energy language instead of with words. And whether in this way, in fact, we do speak plant language and may understand it, but not rationally but somatically.

What if we need not to understand plant language but our own in different terms?

SUMANA ROY: Wonderful question. Thank you. Thank you so much. So this is what Rabindranath feels deprived of, this plant language, that the bee is able to enter into a conversation with a flower, but he can't. So he's angry with god, his creator. He never uses the word god, creator. And the creator has allowed the bee access to the language of flowers in a way he doesn't. So I agree with the person, that this doesn't necessarily have to be a script, obviously, it has its own language.

It might not be the way we understand language and script, and that is why I wanted to end with this, that it exists. It's only that we are illiterate in it. I am particularly interested in this moment that we inhabit. What does this-- it's not so much about plants, they are completely indifferent to our existence. It's our interest in this, what academics, being academics, I am also one. Being as boring as we are, what we have called the vegetal turn in academia. I don't like that phrase. I'm sure you don't either.

And we need to turn away from that phrase, the vegetal turn. What has interested me, Rachael, is the fact that what does this last 100 years of this quest say about us? Whether it's E.E. Cummings or a Chinese poet or many of these Indian writers? This is part of a work that's about 44,000 words long that I had to reduce to 1/10 of its size.

So why are so many writers and scientists-- why are scientists corroborating? What's many of these artists and philosophers and thinkers have already been kind of investigating in their work? And I've always thought of this, and I'm not the only person to think so, I think all of us intuitively have, is that the moment of where science and art and the humanities or the arts come together is a moment of great creativity.

So the scientists in Tel Aviv discovering that this is-- this is how plants cry, as it were, if they are not watered for more than 2 and 1/2 days. And for a scientist to use the word cry is importing Bose's vocabulary of emotion to this moment. And what does these 100 years tell us? Why do we feel freer to use vocabulary of emotions while speaking about plant life when this man, when he was doing so 100 years ago, why he was punished in the way he was? That is where my interest is.

RACHAEL PETERSEN: We probably have time for one more question, if there is one in the room.

SUMANA ROY: I've put everyone-- Oh, Matthew, yes.

RACHAEL PETERSEN: Matt.

AUDIENCE: It's a short kind of a question. I was wondering if we, as human beings, could have two kinds of languages, one of growth, which is much more organic. So if we think about what constitutes us, the DNA, that's a language, right? And the language that we speak artificially, that's another language, which we-- that's our communication. So would there be this kind of a dual or a binary in a plant as well?

You know, the script that you are talking of is more of-- its organic, constitution oriented style of just being there, of its growth, of its reacting. But does it also communicate with other plants? It's sociability? Yeah.

SUMANA ROY: Plants definitely communicate with other plants. We know now, there is the Wood Wide Web. And we are always surprised. I remember pointing this out when I was even a child, taking a drive along the highway and noticing how so many trees are cut. And particularly in post colonies like India, where the word that is-- the god that is worshiped is called development. Not the Hindu gods or goddesses and so on. So everyone is worshipping development and cutting down trees almost as showing of-- show of respect to this god called development.

And I've always been surprised in this most magical way about tree trunks that have been cut and suddenly they're sprouting live. Only when I-- it seemed magical to me. Only when I began reading or investigating about plant communication did I found this was a neighborhood of plants supplying IVF almost, that kind of life sustaining nutrition to a neighbor. So when you mention-- when you were introducing me, you said you have a group that tries to discuss plant life and care.

I don't like moralizing at all, but I think it would do us a lot of good if we were to have an ethics of care modelled from the plant world. So a kind of, not selflessness or selfishness, probably, these are categories they don't understand. But to keep the neighbor alive for our own sake, plants-- for those of you who are familiar with plant communication, plants warning each other about lack of water, about some predator coming and so on.

So, of course, they do have a language that they are speaking. Again, as I was explaining to Rachael, my interest is not in the language that plants are speaking. Why should I-- I am a videshi in that sense. I am a foreigner to that language and will always be. I mean, I will try to understand what the dog is saying, and will only have to imagine. It's impossible. Neither am I interested in science, kind of trying to decipher or translate this language for us.

What's sort of purpose will it serve? It's a kind of intrusion. What I am interested in, [INAUDIBLE], is this, that Why are we so hell bent on understanding this as a script? What does it say about us? I think there's a kind of, much as it might be necessitated by the desire to know more, the stories like instinct, has destroyed so much of the Earth. I think this might not be the best way to understand plant life. There in the slant of your question about coercion, I see this happening in a lot of research as well.

RACHAEL PETERSEN: Matt, do you want to ask your question?

SUMANA ROY: No.

RACHAEL PETERSEN: Let's let Matt ask his question.

MATTHEW: I mean, I want to bring the fugitive eye that you talked about in, and just talk about ways that I feel like plants are talking to me. But the question that I had was, if you could talk a little bit about how Bose related to the machine in this, and the instrument in this and what that might-- what that might say to our time, as deeply entangled as we are in instrumentation, it feels like the instrument is being called to do very different kinds of work here. So what's the machine here?

SUMANA ROY: Wow, thank you. Again, a question I hoped someone would ask me because I didn't have the time to address it. So as you know, all these instruments were made by him. They had to be. But the most moving thing, at least for me, is the fact that he absolutely had no funds to create these instruments. He worked with a tinsmith called Puti Ramdas. Imagine, a tinsmith. So he was drawing some of these drawings I shared with you. He was drawing them and he was asking the tinsmith to-- if they could work on it together.

The DPI, who are the Director of Public Instruction, once gave him a grant of a few thousand rupees, which obviously didn't help. Some of the research that would emerge from these instruments are unfortunately kept away from us. And I tried to-- because I was obviously interested, what was the plant script that he discovered or what he saw? They might be in the Bose Institute, but they are not. The Bose Institute treats Bose's work the way temples treat a relic.

So just the opposite of what Bose would have wanted, which is he would have wanted a-- he never applied for a Copyright or a patent because he wanted to have that kind of-- people to have access to science in this very casual manner, and that somehow has not been maintained. About your question, I spoke to-- because I do not have direct access to these instruments, I spoke to a colleague from biophysics, to ask whether they would be able to create these instruments.

And he said, sure, we'll be able to create it for you, Sumana, but they would only be very-- finer versions of these instruments. We won't be able to create something that was as basic, rudimentary, achieved through trial and error. We-- so they won't have a tinsmith working for them. They would have an instrument maker, as it were. I was speaking to someone at Yale where I gave a talk similar to this one, and we had this discussion about some of these instruments, how some of these instruments might owe to his knowledge of German botanists, because they too were creating some of these instruments much before him, maybe 100 years before him.

But these instruments actually were created. They might have been inspired, but they actually were created by him. I find some of them so moving. They're almost-- today, hundreds years later, they seem to function more on the level of desire than of efficiency, and that also is-- there's also a kind of-- if you've noticed, there's a kind of playfulness about them. I think of them as Avant Garde instruments, even Avant Garde Art, because this is 1922 remember. And the German artists come to India for the first time. There's an exhibition in Kolkata in 1922.

So many of these movements or movements coming together in a way which, retrospectively, we see are in communication with each other, but which it is possible that it was difficult for them to see it as being some kind of correspondence there.

RACHAEL PETERSEN: I'm sitting here inspired to concoct some sort of art exhibit where we hire a tinsmith to recreate some of these machines together. I think that would be amazing. This has been incredible, Sumana. We had hundreds of people sign up online, and I think that speaks not just to the amazing nature of your work and the beauty of it, but you as a person strike me as very beautiful and--

SUMANA ROY: Thank you.

RACHAEL PETERSEN: --kind. And I think we've all felt that tonight. So thank you all for coming and I look forward to being in touch. Thank you, Sumana.

SUMANA ROY: Thank you.

SPEAKER 2: Sponsor, Center for the Study of World Religions.

SPEAKER 1: Copyright, 2024 The President and Fellows of Harvard College.