South Asian Speaker Series Presents: Sumana Roy

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.