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 Nobel laureate 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 intimacy and cohabitation with plant life". Roy explains that she wrote the book in response to a lack of critical engagement with how plants shaped their work, while emphasising that they were not environmentalists, as we understand the term today. Her exploration yields delightful insight into their oeuvre, the place of plants in our society, and how our relationships with them change over time. Roy mentions that while Tagore was an ardent gardener, three of his novellas feature childless women obsessed with gardens, with the latter becoming a site for infidelity. In the essay on the writer Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, she ponders the relationship between flowers and worship, and plants and play. About the poet Shakti Chattopadhyay, Roy writes that while his contemporaries were human-centric, he veered towards the natural world. Her reflections, such as on why green, the colour of flora, denotes jealousy, or why we do not make bouquets of grass flowers or blooms growing along roads, inspire new ways of looking at the vegetal world. One of the most intriguing accounts in the book is of Maya, a refugee from Bangladesh who took up jobs as a domestic worker in Siliguri, including at the author's house. She punctuated her everyday conversations with plant-related proverbs and quips. "Beating a jackfruit to make it ripe", she would say; or "paddy has one virtue, grass a hundred". By going beyond the scholarly lenses of the early chapters, the essay illustrates what plant thinking could look like in a quotidian context. However, where the other six chapters are named after the famous men they feature, the one on Maya is called Anonymous. This framing does not seem to do justice to her individuality. Conversely, one could argue that it puts an unknown individual on the same pedestal as renowned figures for her acuity and the inventive ways in which she characterises the world. It could also be a way to highlight a unique oral culture of plant thinking that is not as valued as the written word and is, thus, usually consigned to anonymity. Given that Maya is the only woman and non-celebrity prominently featured in the book, it would have been interesting to learn more about why Roy focused on men. Is it because the vegetal world has not left as strong an impression on the works of female authors? If so, what are the gendered aspects of plant thinking? Beyond the focus on men, why exclusively Bengalis? It might be that, as a Bengali, she is more familiar with their oeuvre or that certain aspects of Bengali culture allow plant thinking to flourish. Further context would have been useful. In other instances, too, the book could have been more accessible if it had spelt out the implicit. Consider Roy's speculation about "what our history and knowledge systems might have been had our education systems not continued to be colonised, long after Indian independence". Given the divergent critiques of how colonialism affected education, it is unclear which one she is referring to and what ideal she envisions. Without specifics, such statements seem like a romanticisation of the past detached from the historical method. Perhaps reflections on how she grapples with this challenge as a university educator would have made her standpoint clearer. Roy further writes, "So blindly colonised are our scholars. that they often characterise these [oral] archives as belonging to a right-wing politics. The mischaracterisation continues, the plants and plant thinking gradually become extinct." Who are these blindly colonised scholars and which oral archives do they deem right-wing? Considering how some use the language of decolonisation to marginalise minorities and justify this by cherry-picking from or concocting history, her critique seems misdirected. Perhaps, the villains are not the supposedly colonised scholars, but those who do not critically analyse oral archives. While such details would have helped me appreciate the book better, their absence does not make it any less compelling. One can still be awed by the arguments Roy makes and use her plant lens to look at the world in new ways. Her exploration of plant thinking is not merely an intellectual exercise. Plant blindness, part of the larger disconnection from the natural world, has contributed to ecological crises. As increasing urban sprawl and deforestation further reduce people's connection with plants, they perpetuate a vicious circle, which only a privileged few can escape to build intimacy with nature. A recent study published in Earth highlights that the use of nature-related words in books, such as "river", "blossom" and "moss" has decreased by almost two-thirds over the past two centuries. While the analysis looked at English, the results are likely to be similar for other languages; the study also noted that connection with nature was diminishing globally. Even as plants have drifted to the margins of our vocabulary and consciousness, the academic field of "critical plant studies" and popular science media are reexamining our understanding of them and going beyond the hierarchical, utilitarian relationships humans have with them. In the book Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (2013), for example, Michael Marder explores plants as beings that think, communicate and learn, and examines what this looks like in their context. Roy's work, with its novel perspective that goes beyond the frameworks of Western science and philosophy, is a valuable addition to this corpus....