Plant-thinking was theorised by philosopher Michael Marder. ‘Several writers, artists and thinkers derived their worldview, poetics and politics from the plant world,’ Sumana Roy tells in this conversation with Shruti Sharma, founder of Earth Book Club. Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose is among those minds who tried to decipher the wisdom of plants.
The Man Who Made Plants Write is a translation of Bose’s collection of essays, Abyakta, written in Bangla and published in 1922. In this evocative conversation, Sumana Roy prods us to reflect on the ecosophical culture that indulged the scientific minds such as Bose and his contemporaries and how the inheritance of such thinking has shaped us as a society today.
Watch the entire conversation here:
Sumana Roy is the author of two works of nonfiction, How I Became a Tree and Provincials; Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal, a work of literary criticism; Missing: A Novel; My Mother’s Lover and Other Stories; and two collections of poems, Out of Syllabus and VIP: Very Important Plant; she has translated (with an introduction) Jagadish Chandra Bose’s essays in The Man Who Made Plants Write. Her poems, essays and stories have been published in The Paris Review, Orion, Lit Hub, The Point, Granta, Guernica, Prairie Schooner, LARB, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Minnesota Review, Emergence Magazine, The Common, The White Review, Berfrois, The Journal of South Asian Studies, American Book Review, among other places. She is now Professor of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University, India.
Shruti Sharma is the founder of The Earth Book Club and Books on the Delhi Metro, two community-driven initiatives born from a simple belief that books have the power to become both a personal refuge and a tool for collective change.
Through The Earth Book Club, an Instagram-based environmental literature community she started in 2021, Shruti curates green literature for readers of all ages, championing the idea that informed, engaged readers are essential to building a better future. With Books on the Delhi Metro, she brings that same love of reading into the city’s daily commute, turning ordinary journeys into moments of discovery and connection.
By day, Shruti works as a marketing professional at an IT company. But books and stories have always been her true passion. She has spoken on this journey as a TEDx speaker, bringing back the joy of reading in public spaces.
