Sumana Roy, "Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal" (Oxford UP, 2024)

About this episode

Sumana Roy discusses her book on the influence of plant thinkers in twentieth-century Bengal.

Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal (Oxford UP, 2024) by Sumana Roy takes an unexpected cast of writers and artists and, in studying their work as ‘plant thinkers’, looks at how their stories and songs, art and films, and, of course, the idiomatic affected Bengali life and thought. Forest and garden, grass and root, weeds and magical plants—supported by a foliage of thought that allowed them to see beyond the botanical, Rabindranath Tagore, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Jibanananda Das, Shakti Chattopadhyay, Satyajit Ray, and others derived their worldview, their poetics and politics, from the plant world. Jagadish Chandra Bose’s scientific experiments, his research and the philosophy that propelled it, religions and rituals that involved an affective relationship with the natural world, a subterranean invocation of plant philosophy in actions and words, in living and in creative practice, and the political possibilities beyond the nation state that such thinking generated give this book its sap and flow. What might we take from these plant thinkers to rehabilitate our consciousness today? Arnab Dutta Roy is Assistant Professor of World Literature and Postcolonial Theory…

People in this episode

Guest: Sumana Roy

Topics covered

• plant philosophy
• Bengali literature
• art and nature
• politics and poetics
• environmental consciousness

Keywords

• plant thinkers
• Bengal
• literature
• art
• nature
• politics
• Rabindranath Tagore
• Jagadish Chandra Bose

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Oxford UP, Florida Gulf Coast University

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