Sumana Roy: "The Quest for the Plant Script"

Why have our writers, artists, thinkers and scholars been compelled to turn their attention towards the ‘plant script’ in the last one hundred years? Beginning from Jagadish Chandra Bose’s ‘torulipi’ – literally the plant script, through which he hoped plants would write their autobiography – and moving through Rabindranath Tagore’s songs about the ‘language of flowers’ to poets writing about the syntax of the falling of leaves to artists trying to coax a vocabulary out of plants or creating a ‘tree alphabet’, I shall speak about the quest for the plant script, its codes, its compulsions, and its intimate histories.

Sumana Roy is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Ashoka University, and the author of two works of nonfiction, How I Became a Tree (Aleph, 2017, Yale University Press, 2021) and Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries (Yale UP 2024); Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal (OUP 2024), a work of literary criticism; Missing: A Novel; My Mother’s Lover and Other Stories (Bloomsbury 2019); and two collections of poems, Out of Syllabus (Speaking Tiger Books 2019) and VIP: Very Important Plant (Shearsman Books 2022). https://www.ashoka.edu.in/profile/sumana-roy/