India, Jan. 31 -- The scientist Jagadish Chandra Bose wanted plants to write their stories in torulipi (plant script). To this end, he created many instruments to record their responses to stimuli. The filmmaker Satyajit Ray wrote about plants that could "think, feel, conspire, contrive, kill". The author Rabindranath Tagore nurtured lush gardens in Visva-Bharati, the university he founded in Shantiniketan. The writers Shivani and Mahasweta Devi, both of whom studied there, mention its flora in their reminiscences of the university.

These luminaries are the subject of Sumana Roy's book Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal. While they are known today for their contribution to the arts and sciences, they also shared a "vocabulary of ...