Page 196 - EW October 2025

Books

Forgotten PLANT THINKERS OF etan and in Selaidaha,
when he sailed on the
pioneer envir- TWENTIETH CENTURY BENGAL River Padma to oversee the
Sumana Roy
family’s zamindari hold-
onmentalists OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS ings. It was however the
vision of Rabindranath’s
Rs.995
Pages 203 pp father Debendranath that
N THIS EPOCH OF transformed the denuded
the Anthropocene in land that he had acquired
Iwhich the turbulences near Bolpur into an arable
of climate change are in- These notables apart, this All the plant thinkers expanse. His poet-son
creasingly disrupting lives compendium also provides included in this turned it into a meditative
of millions worldwide, the opinions of artists and work evoke an garden with a profusion of
dynamics of how plant life, cinematographers, writers individualistic inti- trees, flowering plants and
forests and vegetation offer and poets, novelists and macy with plant life. creepers — a natural space
a healing option to the autobiographers, even They drew freedom, for leisure and sadhana.
environment is moving to daily communications with joy, and philosophy in The ambience was ideally
centre stage of the global Maya-mashi, an illiterate cohabiting with plant suited to the ashram expe-
discourse. house help with her oral havens rience of empirical study, a
At the imminent UN plant-lore -- individuals “stirring of the mind in the
climate summit in New who, without being con- with plant havens. Roy language of plants.”
York on October 22, scious ‘environmentalists’ argues these writers and The next three chapters
updated national commit- shared habitats, concerns, artists did not use plants bring to our notice the
ments to carbon emission thoughts, proverbs on merely as metaphors, fictional repertoire
reduction are likely to be ‘plant poetics’. symbols and ornaments. In of a novelist and two
made. Outside statistics In this effort to focus on their works she discovers poets — all writing in
and logistics of environ- a tradition of “plant think- that literary history had Bengal’s charming mother
mental issues humanists ing” Roy moves towards become ecological history. tongue. The close textual
are evoking traditional decolonising the mind She traces the beginnings readings reconfigure the
plant lore to wean away — by making her read- of literary modernism plant-human equation
people from destroying ing of Jagadish Chandra, in Bengal to the way in from perspectives that
plant ecology and the tree Rabindranath, Bibhut- which changing equations go beyond literary. For
cover that protects humans ibhushan Bandyopad- with plant life in the 20th instance, writing about
and the universe. Contrary hyay, Jibanananda Das, century shaped visual and the foregrounding of plant
to popular belief respect Shakti Chattopadhyay and linguistic expression. ecology in the opening of
for plant life, woods and Satyajit Ray an immersive Jagadish Chandra Bose Bibhuti Bhushan’s (the
forests was a live and vo- experience. Rooted in the believed in an underlying novelist’s Pather Panchali
cal issue in Bengal over a tactile regional texture of unity amidst the multiplic- was the poignant narrative
century ago. plant varieties and leaves, ity of varied phenomena that Satyajit Ray turned
In this insightful grass, vegetation, flow- in the natural world, a into an iconic film) novel
retrospective book, plant ers and even weeds, the democratic philosophy he Ichhamati, Roy describes
enthusiast and academic intense textual analysis inherited from the Brahmo it “a revolutionary
Sumana Roy brings togeth- of their essays and poems Samaj. Ignoring Western formulation of history”.
er comments of physicist record a history of directly taxonomy, he conducted She opines that the history
Acharya Jagadish Chan- cohabiting and engaging fine-tuned experiments of plant life, its settlement,
dra Bose who believed with plant life. that captured agency, death and evacuation from
that plants are “living All the plant think- response and language in spaces “constitute our
things” to Rabindranath ers included in this work the plant world. A plant national history”.
Tagore who established evoke an individualistic speaking for itself was new Even as the era of the
the Patha Bhavan ashram intimacy with plant life, self-reflexive modernist Anthropocene was on its
school and Viswa-Bharati a philosophy now on the literary culture. threshold, Jibanananda
University at Santinik- “verge of extinction”. They Likewise Nobel laure- Das’ poetry was an ode to
etan where “trees and drew freedom and joy, ate Rabindranath Tagore the botanical history of
the seasons” were the philosophy and creative was intimately tuned into provincial Bengal. In-
“heart of the cosmogony”. sustenance in cohabiting nature, both in Santinik- fluenced by French poet

196 EDUCATIONWORLD OCTOBER 2025