Close-up from an autochrome of Jagadish Chandra Bose by Georges Chevalier, 1920.
| Photo Credit: Wiki Commons
Dear Reader,
In my search for alternative realms to inhabit, I think I have found a home in the world of plants and trees. They have gestured to me since childhood, whispering of a plane full of living beings who breathe, fight, suffer, survive, and die just like we do, but unremarked or ignored by our senses.
My sceptical self has tended to dismiss the feeling as sentimental, imbibed from the Romantic poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Emily Brontë. At the same time, as a Bengali, I was familiar from school textbooks with the works of scientist Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858-1937), who, in the early 20th century, had created a stir by suggesting that plants have a nervous system and are, therefore, as alive as we are. (He had reportedly horrified George Bernard Shaw by conducting an experiment in which a cabbage went through death throes when immersed in boiling water.)
Bose had his detractors, especially in the West, but they could not prove him wrong. Recent research has bolstered his hypotheses by suggesting that plants are not only alive but also intelligent, perhaps as much as or more than humans.
German forester Peter Wohlleben’s book, The Hidden Life of Trees, published in 2015, quickly attained cult status by putting forward the hypothesis of a “wood-wide web”, an underground network of microbes running through forests that enables trees to communicate with one another. The veneration the book generated was probably exaggerated because we still do not know for sure exactly how or to what extent trees interact. But if we discount Wohlleben’s tendency to anthropomorphise and jump to conclusions, the book is lovely, more so in its graphic avatar published recently.
Adapted by Fred Bernard, with exquisite illustrations by Benjamin Flao, The Hidden Life of Trees takes you on a journey through sun-dappled forests in different seasons. It opens the portal to a green paradise populated with woodpeckers, butterflies, dragonflies, mushrooms, fungi, earth-dwelling insects, fruits, and flowers of the forest. The book’s science fiction/ speculative fiction potentials are also high, for instance, when the text says, “There are more organisms living in one handful of this soil than there are humans living on earth.” Most of these beings are invisible to the naked eye and some of them do not even have names yet, but “the forest life cycle—and the society we live in—depends on them.” Here I can imagine a story of a yet-unnamed microbe working industriously in a yet-unseen laboratory to keep the world going, unbeknownst to us.
Incidentally, not many of us know that J.C. Bose was a sci-fi writer, too. I recently came across one of his short stories titled “Palatak Tufan“ (The Runaway Cyclone), first published in 1896 as “Niruddesher Kahini” (The Story of the Missing One). The winning entry in a competition meant to promote a hair oil called Kuntalin, it is delightfully tongue-in-cheek, with a throbbing vein of political satire directed at the British government sitting in India at that time.
But while reading it in the original Bengali, I realised with a shock that I could not understand its finer nuances. After the initial bout of self-flagellation at the dreadful ignorance of my mother tongue, I began to figure out why I was stumbling. Bose not only writes in sadhu bhasha or formal Bangla, which is quite different from colloquial Bengali, but also uses a lot of scientific terms in Bengali that I am unfamiliar with because I received my education in the English medium. For instance, Bose uses the terms amlajan, dymlajan, and udjan for oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen, respectively—terms that I had never encountered in my English chemistry textbooks. So, it was almost with relief that I turned to the English translation (2013) of the story by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay. Read it here.
The incident made me appreciate anew the importance of translation in a multilingual country like India. If translation helps me better enjoy a story written in my own mother tongue, then imagine the service it renders when it unlocks the secrets of languages I do not know at all. Maybe, one day, we will comprehend the language of plants too through translation!
The International Booker Prize celebrates literature in translation, turning the spotlight to remarkable books that readers outside the Anglophone world do not have access to. It was a moment of pride for India when Hindi author Geetanjali Shree won it in 2022 along with her translator, Daisy Rockwell. The duo talk about their latest novel in translation, Our City That Year, in these two perceptive interviews with Varsha Tiwary. Read them together to get an idea of the difficult but enriching arts of writing and translation that complement each other.
I leave you here to return to my potted plants: I have observed that they droop if I don’t pay them attention.
See you again very soon,
Anusua Mukherjee
