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

Summary

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Podcast Summary:

Podcast: New Books Network
Episode: Sumana Roy, "Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Host: Arnab Dutta Roy
Guest: Professor Sumana Roy
Date: May 19, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode spotlights Professor Sumana Roy and her landmark book, "Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal" (Oxford UP, 2024). Professor Roy, celebrated author and professor of creative writing at Ashoka University, discusses her journey with plant life as a literary and philosophical subject, introduces the concept of "plant thinkers," and explores the intersection of literary history and ecological history in Bengal. The conversation flows through personal memories, critical theory, plant blindness, and the ethical possibilities for reimagining our relationship with the plant world.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origins of Fascination with Plants

• Personal Narrative and Early Experiences
  • Roy reflects on formative childhood experiences, notably a memorable school project involving planting seeds in Horlicks bottles, which instilled a lifelong enchantment with plant life.

    “The wonder of watching the very first leaves emerge… might have set off this addiction to wonder, to enchantment.” (03:37)

  • Describes growing up in a “lower middle class… indisciplined neighborhood of plant life” in Siliguri, vividly recalling how neighbors cultivated various plants as a practical and cultural part of daily life, rather than for aesthetic purposes.
• Emotional Connection
  • “I had no real consciousness, no real awareness or conscious awareness of loving plants. So I'm always confused, you know, and uneasy when someone says you love plants. It was like not being conscious of loving one's grandparents, perhaps.” (06:46)
• A Shift Toward Plants
  • Roy shares a moment of turning toward plants during a period of sadness and detachment from human society in early adulthood, seeking an alternative way of life and eventually “wanting to become a tree.”

    “I began to think of ways to survive because I did not want to die. I was looking for a way of life outside the emotion economy of humans... my consciousness came to rest on trees.” (08:40)

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2. Defining the “Plant Thinker”

• Conceptual Genesis
  • Inspired by her exposure to the “plant humanities” at a Dumbarton Oaks residency, Roy felt keenly the lack of an established archive for Indian perspectives on plants and resolved to create one.
  • Explains that the idea behind “plant thinkers” draws on Michael Marder’s philosophical writings, but Roy extends it to include not only trained philosophers but also artists, writers, filmmakers, and even her family’s domestic help.
• Who Are the Plant Thinkers of Bengal?
  • Includes major figures such as Jagadish Chandra Bose, Rabindranath Tagore, Jibanananda Das, Satyajit Ray, among others, whose creative work draws metaphorically, politically, and poetically from plants.
  • Importance of a democratized archive, extending plant thinking to “illiterate” or marginalized individuals like Maya Mashi, Roy’s childhood caregiver, who used plant lore and idioms as forms of resistance and expression.

    “I'm extending the term plant thinker into a more democratic space.” (15:44)

• Beyond the Nation State
  • Argues that plant thinkers found “political possibilities beyond the nation state,” refusing to be confined by modern political boundaries in their ecological consciousness. (13:58)

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3. Plant Blindness: What It Is and Why It Matters

• Definition and Cultural Critique
  • Shares Matthew Hall’s concept of “plant blindness”—the widespread tendency to overlook plants as living agents, embedded in cultural, educational, and aesthetic institutions.

    “Our eyes and minds are trained to only notice the human and perhaps those, only those that cause fear to us… plants had been ignored, ignored and overlooked… they are therefore only backdrop.” (19:09)

• Everyday Examples
  • Illustrates how plants are placed at the periphery in both urban planning (“boundary wall”) and iconic art (“What are the trees behind Mona Lisa?”).

    “They are on the periphery of our consciousness.” (20:47)

• Broader Relevance
  • Host notes the invisibility of plants even in lush environments like Florida, tying plant blindness to habits of seeing “nature” as “unused” space meant for future development. (23:16)

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4. Remedying Plant Blindness and Decolonizing Knowledge

• Pedagogical and Ethical Shifts
  • Recounts guidance from her own professor: trace everything on your plate back to its source—farmer, plants, soil—as a foundational exercise in ethics and attention.

    “All that we need to be taught is in the plate of food that we eat… Once one is aware of where one's food comes from… the politics falls into place.” (25:26)

• Decolonizing Theory
  • Argues for critically revisiting literary theory’s elitist and imported aspects. Calls for theory rooted in lived experience, openness, and inclusion, moving beyond text-centrism.
  • Theory should be as accessible as “rasa” (emotion, aesthetic relish), available to everyone, not “something passed through generations” but “something more alive, that is changing.” (35:08)
  • Advocates for classrooms where students’ lived experiences and writing are cited and valued as valid sites of theorizing.

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5. Literary History as Ecological History

• Interweaving Literary and Ecological Narratives
  • Roy asserts, “literary history is ecological history,” because literature everywhere (from Kalidasa’s Meghadutam to Tagore’s Shantiniketan experiments) constantly encodes the changing realities of the plant world.

    “The plant world, the animal world, these are not backgrounds for this child and their teacher. They are as part of the world as the human being.” (28:52)

• Examples From Bengal
  • From Tagore’s nature-based education methods to Jibanananda Das’ poetry longing for vegetal rebirth, Bengali artistic culture centers plant life materially and imaginatively.

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6. A Joyful, Intimate Relationship With Plants

• What Readers Should Take Away
  • When asked for the single takeaway, Roy emphasizes joy—rather than guilt—as the animating force that can heal our relationship with the world:

    “That joy and not guilt will save us and our world from ourselves… this intimacy with the plant world is for them like turning towards their favorite side to sleep on.” (39:20)

  • Aspires for readers to rediscover “a relationship of intimacy and ease between the human reader and the plant world.”

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Notable Quotes

• On Early Plant Encounters:

  “Every morning we ran from the school gate to the windowsill… the most magical period in my student life.” — Professor Sumana Roy (04:38)

• On ‘Plant Thinkers’:

  “They derived their worldview, their poetics and politics from the plant world.” — Professor Sumana Roy (13:23)

• On Plant Blindness:

  “They are on the periphery of our consciousness.” — Professor Sumana Roy (20:47)

• On Literary/Ecological History:

  “Our ecological history is our literary history.” — Professor Sumana Roy (31:15)

• On Theory:

  “Theory must be accessible to everyone… for me, theory is kaavya and itihas, Kaavya poetry and itihas history and experience.” — Professor Sumana Roy (34:28)

• On Joy As Salvation:

  “Joy and not guilt will save us and our world from ourselves and the world as well.” — Professor Sumana Roy (39:20)

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Key Timestamps

• 03:37 – Professor Roy’s early plant memories and formative experiences
• 11:28 – Explanation of “plant thinkers” and the creation of an Indian plant humanities archive
• 18:20 – Definition and discussion of “plant blindness”
• 25:17 – Pedagogical steps to overcoming plant blindness and decolonizing thought
• 27:36 – Literary history as ecological history; concrete examples from Bengali literature
• 32:23 – Reconceptualizing theory through plant thinking and democratization
• 39:20 – The book’s main lesson: the saving power of joy and intimacy with plants

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Closing Thoughts

Professor Sumana Roy’s conversation exemplifies a profound entanglement of life, learning, and literature with the vegetal world. By recentering plants as active participants in our histories, poetries, and philosophies, she invites listeners and readers to rediscover wonder, agency, and ethical connection with the non-human world. The episode is both a scholarly intervention and a gentle, poetic call to notice the green presences at the edge of our vision.

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Transcript

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[Arnab Dutta Roy]

welcome to New Book Network. I'm your host, Arnab Dutta Roy, an assistant professor of World literature at Florida Gulf Coast University. Today we have the great honor of welcoming back to our podcast Professor Shumona Roy, who will be speaking to us about her book, planned Thinkers of 20th Century Bengal, Oxford University Press, 2024. Shumona Roy is the author of two works of nonfiction, How I Became a Tree and Provincials, a Work of Literary Criticism, plant thinkers of 20th century Bengal, a Novel Missing, A Collection of stories, My Mother's Lover and Other Stories, and two collections of poems out of Syllabus and VIP Very Important Plot. She has translated, with an introduction, Jagadish Chandra Bose's essay in the man who Made Plants Right. Her poems, essays and stories have appeared in numerous venues, including the Paris Review on Orion, Literary Hub, the Point, Granta Guernica, Larb, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and others. She is professor of Creative Writing at Ashoka University, India. Professor Roy, welcome back to our podcast. I'm so thrilled that you could find time out of your busy schedule to speak with me. You've devoted a significant part of your writing life to thinking with and about plants. From How I Became a Tree to vip. Very important plant. What initially drew you to the world of plants, particularly as a literary and philosophical subject? And what continues to sustain this fascination?

[Professor Shumona Roy]

I don't know, Arno. I had no awareness that I felt any more close to plants than I did say to eating momo or to imagining what nomita kakima, who lived next door might be cooking for lunch. When compelled to think about it, as you have made me do here, I can think of two moments. The first is from school. I'm in the second grade, or class two, as we used to say, and second grade in Marbat High School in Shiliguri, from where I'm speaking to you. Our class teacher, Nora Bansal has asked us to get two empty Horlicks bottles. These bottles had become the name of a type like Cesarox is for photocopying now. Once we were in school, she asked us to fill a quarter of these bottles with soil. I'm sorry, but I can't believe it's called dirt in America. And then she put a few seeds. And then Mrs. Bansal, she put a few seeds that were wet from seeking soaking into our hands. The next few weeks, I would say for the most magical period, was the most magical period in my student life. Every morning we ran from the school gate to the windowsill in the old building of our school. We inspected the bottles for growth. The science textbook that we studied in school was called nature study. And Mrs. Bansal was teaching us to do exactly that at the age of five or six. So the wonder of watching the very first leaves emerge that might have set off this addiction to wander, to enchantment. I also manob. I also grew up in a lower middle class neighborhood. I was never conscious of it, but I grew up amidst an indisciplined. Is that a word? Indisciplined neighborhood of plant life. So in Srili Guri's Ashrampada, my neighbors, families whose memories and eating and living habits were formed by the agricultural produce and rivers of Bangladesh. Now I feel nervous to say this now, you know, given where we are in Bengal today. They were formed with the agricultural produce and rivers of Bangladesh. So before they too, like seeds, were flung into spaces unfamiliar to their ancestors and they created such gardens. So you know, daily wage laborers, people who worked as peons, basically very low income households. So what kind of atmosphere did I grow up in? So chilli plants by a street side water drain, pumpkin and bottle gourd vines climbing onto tin roofs of what used to be called kacha toilets. Unseasonal marigold flowers from a leftover garland used to worship some goddess. Fresh coriander from seeds scattered near the well where they grew beside. I don't know these English names, where they grew beside ghrita kumari. And they're often a banana plant offering fruit, flower or stem. And always, always there would be an assembly of kochu leaves waiting to be devoured. So, you know, roses were not grown for flowers. They became fences, valued more for their thorns than their flowers. And they were. And they were to keep strangers away more than to attract, you know, strangers, whether they were humans or non humans. Then there was the tulsi plant that would, every Saturday, bring together a congregation hungry for the airy sweetness of batasha, thrown up into the air, called holy lute, then gathered from the earth and put urgently inside our mouths. There was the shundamaluti and nayantara and green. So many kinds of shark or shrag that sometimes it seemed that the Bengali had evolved from the cow. So. And every morning there would be flower thieves with a lanky bamboo pole in their hands collecting flowers for their gods, never missing an opportunity to break a branch from a tree to plant in their garden. So people were basically finding and foraging, planting and pollinating. So how did I get here? As I grew older and the town started changing, it's no longer the Shiliguri of my childhood, and the plants started receding and eventually diminishing into flower pots and balconies, I became aware of missing something for which I didn't have a name. I still don't have a name for that. What was I missing? But, Onav, I must hasten to tell you that I had no real consciousness, no real awareness or conscious awareness of loving plants. So I'm always confused, you know, and uneasy when someone says you love plants. It's not. It's, you know, it was like not being conscious of loving one's grandparents, perhaps. I don't know. So in the very early years of this century, as I began to feel of the 21st century, as I began to feel a kind of sadness and emotional detachment from the human social world, I began to think of ways to survive because I did not want to die. I have said this elsewhere, that I was looking for a way of life outside the emotion economy of humans. And after thinking of various possibilities, which included the ceiling fan, exactly, the ceiling fan above my head right now, I think my consciousness came to rest on trees. I wanted to live like a tree. I wanted to become a tree. And that was more than 15 years ago. And to answer the question that you've asked me, since then, I have found myself noticing plants everywhere. I suffer from the opposite of plant blindness, as you can see. So over the years I found myself exploring philosophical botany in various genres. How I Became a Tree is about the investigation of what it might mean for humans to become a tree. And this is in Prose vip, the book that you mentioned, very important plant. It runs in the opposite direction. It's an investigation of what it might mean for plants to be brought into the human social situation. And I try to do this through poems. Plant thinkers of 20th century Bengal, about which, you know, we are going to have this discussion today, is literary criticism. It is an investigation about the culture of plant poetics in 20th century Bengal. And I have, and this is not a plug, I've recently translated Jagodish Chandra Bose, the scientist Jagodist Chandra Bose's essays about plant sentience, Plant Intelligence and plant Emotions from Bangladesh into English. And it's just out from Yale University Press. I hope that answers this question.

[Arnab Dutta Roy]

Definitely does. Thank you so much. So in this book you engage a wide range of major 20th century Bengali figures from, as you just mentioned, Jagajish Chandra Bose to Rabindranath Tagore to Jeebanandu Das and Satyajit Ray. Yet you frame their writing and their intellectual legacy in a very new and innovative way, calling them plant thinkers. What does this term mean for you? And. And how did you arrive at this kind of a conceptualization, particularly when you are thinking about the legacy of these, like, intellectuals?

[Professor Shumona Roy]

Okay, let me just tell you how I began to conceive this. Okay, where do I start? Anub. I became aware of what is called the plant humanities when on a residency at Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University. Six of us had been selected for this residency. I had to attend online. It was during the time of the COVID lockdown and I didn't want to take the risk of flying to Boston. So it would be midnight in India at that time, everyone around me would be asleep and I would listen to the other writers and researchers speaking from Australia and South America, those who are who hadn't been able to travel and those who were at, you know, Harvard. Of course, the ease with which they spoke about their quote unquote archives in their respective linguistic and literary cultures and scientific cultures as well. I hate confessing this to you and publicly, but I began to feel deprived of such an archive. When I had begun working on what would become how I became a tree. I would turn to people all the time. Who do I mean by people? Historians, botanists, artists, friends, family, even strangers while on a walk in the neighborhood or elsewhere. And for more than 15 years or more, I had been reading and gathering and collecting material on plant philosophy and literature and art. So I thought it would be a shame for me to be selfish and not share it with others. It is from this that my idea of creating an archive for the Indian plant humanities came up. The website is going to go live soon and I'll be happy if your students, colleagues, readers, listeners, you know the audience, if they contribute to the archive. So this book. So this is how has. What is the question that I am trying to hold in this website or this archive? How has the Indian subcontinent been looking at plant life? Not the scientific alone, but as metaphor and analogy, lived experience, art, cinema, literature. Now it was. I wanted plant thinkers of 20th century Bengal to be an example of such, of what I had in mind when I thought of the Indian plant humanities. So you asked me about plant thinker. Plant thinker is an expression I borrow from Michael Mahder. Mahda looks at continental philosophy and picks philosophers who have written about plant life. I am making a departure here. None of the artists I write about are trained philosophers. I doubt that they thought of themselves as thinkers at all. And that's why I like your question. So what I'm doing is I or what I have done is I've taken a cast of writers and artists from the first half of 20th century Bengal. And in studying their work as plant thinkers, I look at how their stories, how their songs, art, cinema, and of course the idiomatic, how it affected Bengali life and thought and living and literature and art. So the forest, the garden, grass and root and weeds and magical plants. So Rabindranath Tagore, Bibuti, Mushan, Bondapadhya, Jeevananda, Dasa, Shukti, Chautaupatay, Satyajitri and many, many others. They derived their worldview, and this is my argument, that they derived their worldview, their poetics and politics from the plant world. So Jagadesh Chandra Bose's scientific experiments, his research and the philosophy that propelled it, the religions and rituals that involved an affectionate relationship and an effective relationship with the natural world. This is what I think constituted plant philosophy at that time. And I think what it did was it supplied them in their living and in their creative practice, with political possibilities beyond the nation state. And all these writers and artists and filmmakers, poets that I have mentioned, none of them subscribe to the idea of the nation state as particularly the kind of nation state that we see today, whether where you are or where I am. And so what might we take from these plant thinkers to rehabilitate our consciousness today? I also write, as you know, about Maya Mashi, the domestic help who worked in our house and who helped my mother to look after me and my brother, particularly because I used to keep very unwell as a child. How this woman, again I'm scared of saying this, but she's no more, so she's safe. How this woman, a refugee from Bangladesh, a woman turned angry, very angry in fact, by an unfair and indecent world, lashed back at it through plant idioms and proverbs. She was what would be classified as illiterate, but for me, she was a plant thinker. So you see, I'm extending the term plant thinker into a more democratic space. There are others I would have liked to write about. Nandulal Bosch, Hrithik Ghatto, Binod Bihari Mukerji, Leela Mojumdar, Advaitar Mallabormon. But this is just a book, it's not an encyclopedia. So I've continued to write about them. Say, for instance, an essay on the trees in Nitigatto Cinema was published recently by sag, the South Asian Avagad anthology. So, yes, I'll continue to write about many, many more plant thinkers.

[Arnab Dutta Roy]

Thank you so much. I want to come back to the idea of plant blindness that we briefly talked about before. So you write that many innovative plant thinkers in Bengal and around the world are doing such transformative work, work with the potential to reshape how we imagine and live with plants. Yet much of this goes unnoticed due to what you identify as plant blindness. Could you explain what this plant blindness is, how it manifests and why it is so pervasive?

[Professor Shumona Roy]

Oh, thank you for this question, for this opportunity to explain this so or no. I borrow the term plant blindness from Matthew hall in his book Plants as Persons A Philosophical Botany. Matthew hall observes, and I'm quoting from memory, that most places on earth which contain life are visibly plantscapes. And if millions of years could be measured in meters, the history of plants would. Would. I'm paraphrasing. The history of plants would equate to a 500 meter long walk, while ours, the human species, would be no more than a few centimeters. And it is impossible, therefore, to think of the history of any culture without simultaneously considering the history of its plants. But the human imagination, our imagination, socialized and conditioned by A robust anthropocentrism where our eyes and minds are trained to only notice the human and perhaps those, only those that cause fear to us. Because of that, plants had been ignored, ignored and overlooked. And so they are therefore only backdrop and backdrop. So botanists and biology educators such as James Wandersea, Elizabeth Schussler, they've argued that these tendencies to marginalize plant forms are symptomatic of a wider phenomenon of what Matthew hall called blind blindness, the inability, our inability, the inability of humans to distinguish and appreciate plants as active agents in the ecosystem. So it's possible that you would remember if my camera, the camera on my laptop was functioning, you would remember, perhaps you know the color, the black dress that I'm wearing. But it's possible that you might have forgotten or not even noticed the palm behind me. So you've asked me to explain and I'll give you two examples. Quick ones, very easy ones. Look at the architecture of your house or your building. Where are the trees? Aren't they near what is called the boundary wall? So, so you see the building is in the middle and that the trees or the plants are near the boundary wall. So that's what, that's analogical to where they are, I believe in our consciousness as well. They are on the periphery of our consciousness. I'll give you a quick second example. We've all seen the Mona Lisa. Let me ask you a question I often ask my students, and it's not a question to Arno, but to anyone who's tuning in. What are the trees behind Mona Lisa or are there any trees at all? We all fumble for an answer. We all know that Mona Lisa doesn't have eyebrows, for that was the fashion in those times. But we've not noticed the trees behind Mona Lisa. See, John Berger wrote an entire book on how to see art. Ways of seeing shows us how to see humans in art, humans and their objects. The word tree doesn't occur even once in the book. I think. So that's a plant blindness or no

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[Arnab Dutta Roy]

that's that that is so fascinating. And really, that is true. I mean I feel that particularly since I've moved to Florida and Florida is like the marshes and the Everglades we live among in the middle of nature. Here, however people choose to. I mean not consciously. I mean, I feel like at this point it's unconscious to not see nature as nature. So one thing that like was really that struck me is how people see nature as used or unused lots. So I mean like I would you. You'd see like a forest and then somebody people like. The standard perception is that's an unused lot where like a development would soon happen. So like trees and nature don't exist as themselves. They are like places that have either been developed or will eventually be developed. So yeah, and I feel like what you are describing is kind of extended. Like what I experience is a part has something to do with that. Thank you so much. So my next question then would be, what steps, intellectual, cultural, ecological do you believe are necessary to overcome plant blindness? How might we begin to decolonize our ways of thinking, sensing, perceiving, in order to cultivate a more reciprocal, attentive and ethically grounded relationship with the plant world?

[Professor Shumona Roy]

Living and writing, living and teaching, living and learning. I don't think they are not separate things, as anyone who's tried to write or teach or learn is aware. So living and pedagogy are not separate either. In Shiliguri College where I studied, my professor Abhijit Majumdar, Charu Majumdar's son, once told us that all that we need to be taught is in the plate of food that we eat. And this is what he said and let me use what he said to respond to this wonderful question that you've asked. He said, look at the rice and dal and vegetables and fish and meat on your plate. Now keep going back to where each came from. Who cooked the rice? And then where did the rice grains come from? Who was the shopkeeper? How did he get it? Who was the distributor? Who was the retailer from home? Keep going back until you reach the farmer. Do the same for every single ingredient, Oil and salt included. Every single vegetable and fish and poultry. For me, that is a moment of reconstituting theory. Does any critical theory syllabus have anything from a farmer or a forest dweller? And this is just one example. Let's begin with this. It's an exercise, what Professor Majumdar said. Abhijit Majumdar. Let's begin with this. It's an exercise in experience and exploration. And more importantly, ethics. The question that you asked me. And of course, as you pointed out of attention. And he said, and I'm paraphrasing him. This is all the politics we need to practice to begin with. Once one is aware of where one's food comes from. You know, the politics falls into place. So this, I think, is the way to begin decolonizing.

[Arnab Dutta Roy]

Beautiful. In the introduction, you. You state that literary history is ecological history. Can you explain what do you mean by this?

[Professor Shumona Roy]

I'm so glad you noticed this. In writing that sentence or making that statement. I was condensing many things. The first of these would be the trigger for writing this book, of course. But I was also summarizing what I had discovered in the process of writing it. And I've begun seeing it everywhere, in every literature, in almost everything I read. I notice it in art and in art history. As I shared with you a little while ago. So whether it's Robindranath who is, you know, or no. Introducing a revolutionary science module for children in Pathubhavon, the school that he founded. Where he made them record the seasons. Through the arrival and disappearance of flora and fauna in Shantiniketan. So they did not have a science book. It was called Prakriti Part. And what they had instead was a notebook. Where they were recording the arrival of the seasons. Through the changing. Sorry, the changing seasons. Through the arrival of different kinds of flora and fauna. And so the notebook, the child's notebook. Was actually turning into a textbook. Because it's a record, it's a history. So whether it's the children. Where he made them record the seasons through this. As I said, the arrival and disappearance of Laura and Fauna and Shantaniketan or the artists teaching in Bishopharati, the university he founded, say Vinod Bihari Mukerji and Nandulal Bose and others. They are both. Whether it's the child or their teacher, they are doing the same thing. The plant world, the animal world, these are not backgrounds for this child and their teacher. They are as part of the world as the human being. Taking it in, cooking it, eating it, digesting it. And so with the other thinkers I've written about Vibhuti Bhushan keeping a diary, a wondrous diary about the cutting of forests in Bihar to make way for agricultural land. And this diary would feed his novel Arunok, a book that would in today's categorization be called environment. Lot of fiction, I think Jeevananda Das Melancholic Jeevanandu would write about grass and jackfruit and tangerine and all kinds of flowers. And he would constantly write about dying. But he wanted to return. He wanted to be reborn and reborn. How? Reborn as a tree or plant in, to use his phrase, Rupushi Bangla. Beautiful Bengal. This is true not only of all those I'm writing about, but I believe about literature and art itself. So why is Kalidas, for instance, recording the wondrous landscape of the Indian subcontinent, its flora in particular? So the cloud, or the cloud messenger in Meghdutam notices all the plants and flowers. And that is what Meghtam, the cloud messenger is. And that is what the cloud messenger does. Or for instance, why Shakuntala of his epic A girl of the forest or a girl in the forest? Why Dushyant? What is the reason for their. For the confusion? Dushyant from a city, a king. And here is this girl who's not only raised in a forest, but raised by the unwritten rules of the forest. So a different kind of marriage or practice of marriage or wedding. You take up any literary text and you will see the impress of its ecological, ecological history in it. So there's a reason, I think Andrew Marvell has to create that summarizing phrase, green thought in a green shade. Right after the Renaissance. I really believe that our ecological history is our literary history or no.

[Arnab Dutta Roy]

Wow. You also write. What I seek to propose is also to modify our understanding of what constitutes theory. What kind of reconceptualization of theory does your work gesture towards? How might attending to plants materially, conceptually, aesthetically invite us to imagine new modes of theorizing?

[Professor Shumona Roy]

I hope you won't be you won't stop being friends with me after this Theory. Okay? Theory, a word and category imported urgently and I think lackadaisically from the Anglo American humanities establishment. Not, and I would say it's not a coincidence that this was being done at a time when the World bank itself was doling out money to quote unquote, third world countries as if it were doing some kind of philanthropy. So theory became, suddenly became the main course of the English syllabus. I'm using, I'm punning on course, of course, and I'm sorry for that. Every literary text and, you know, theory turned everything to text, into text. We've forgotten that there was a world before that and that there can be and must be a word and world after text, text in quotes. So every literary text became. Became an exhibition site or a surgery table, whichever way you look at it. So, you know, specialists looked for what they wanted or new, a kind of confirmation bias. So like the cardiologist looks for the heart or the nephrologist for the kidney, experts from different areas of specialization began looking for symptoms in the text. So reading the word like this will lead us to create a more equitable world. This is the godlike logic that decides our syllabus. For instance, I chose to teach the theory of Rasa because I believe it's the most democratic among all theories. I know it is available to everyone. Art, emotion is available to everyone. It is experienced by everyone and not restricted to those who have the vocabulary given to them by a university education. So it's not that because you and I have PhD degrees, we will feel love or anger more than someone who doesn't. Right. So my problem with theory is that it's become terribly elitist. And it's life and lifestyle, I would say, in the university has made it terribly elitist. I think theory must be accessible to everyone. And theory for me is kaavya and itihas, Kaavya poetry and itihas history and experience. So I believe that my students, for instance, are themselves Rasa theorists through their life and experience and creative practice. They are arguing with Rasa theorists from hundreds and of years ago, with Bharat Muni, who created, or, you know, put this, put the Natya Shastra together, wrote the Natya Shastra, battanayaka abhinavagupta. So we forget this often as well, that our students or our contemporaries, that they too are responding to the pressure of history as much as, say they are creating that pressure themselves on the world, on us, on themselves. Like plant blindness, we Too, in spite of all the correctness in our behavior and intention as teachers suffer from a kind of blindness about those we teach or raise. It might be our own children, you know, our relatives. I find that literature and creative writing professors can often be prescriptive. We want our students to write in a certain manner and style. We. We want to indoctrinate them into what we believe is right. But we are. We want to change them, but we are unwilling to be changed by them. I think the. Because you asked me about theory, I think the pedagogical impulse and the theorizing impulse must be omnidirectional. We must improvise, like, say, musicians do, and to extend the metaphor, we must jam with them. So even during the teaching semesters, when I'm off, sometimes asked, what have you been reading? I ask the person asking me. I tell the person asking me this question, I'm reading student writing. And I think they might misunderstand this to be a chore with some element of drudgery. But I am. I feel very fortunate. My students are among my favorite contemporary writers, and I try to incorporate their responses in the courses I teach. I often mention former students who've taken the same course and mention their writing and responses in the classroom a few years before I'm teaching, who responded a few years before them. So it's a manner of citation in the classroom that comes to me naturally from the way I live and talk. And one of the things about theory is that, or my resistance to this model of critical theory is that I. I know that I know that I know very little and that I'm often wrong. And my students belong to a generation, and I'm sure you feel the same way where they are petrified of saying or doing anything wrong. So my only ambition as a teacher has been to give them some kind of freedom. So the humanities likes to talk about freedom as a kind of abstraction. It would be good to allow our students to taste this freedom without our mediation. So, and I think, what is theory? What one does with one's limited freedom determines the personality of our imagination, after all. And for me, this is where theory must come from. Instead of it being a hand me down, something passed through generations, it must be something that is more alive, that is changing without an ism always attaching itself to it necessarily that it's a living thing. So it's not. It's not shastra alone, but it's also sutra practice, experience.

[Arnab Dutta Roy]

Thank you so much. That was wonderful. So that brings us to the conclusion so if there is one idea or thought or lesson that you would like readers to remember or learn or take away from the experience of reading this book book, what would it be?

[Professor Shumona Roy]

That joy and not guilt will save us and our world from ourselves and the world as well. So all the plant thinkers I write about in this book and I've written about other plant thinkers in Bengal and India elsewhere, because as I said, you can't put everything in one book. They turn to the plant world for joy, for calm, for education, sure, like I did, but primarily for refuge. And this includes Maya Mashi, the angriest among them, separated from them by her gender and class and caste and location. This intimacy with the plant world is for them like turning towards their favorite side to sleep on. I hope that reading plant Thinkers of 20th century Bengal will re establish a relationship of intimacy and ease between the human reader and the plant world.

[Arnab Dutta Roy]

Thank you so much Shumanadhi. This was a pleasure. I have learned a lot from this book and I'm sure that students and our audience would learn a lot from it as well. So I do like I hope this convinced many to check out this book if they haven't already. But I'm really grateful for your time. Thank you so much.

[Professor Shumona Roy]

Thank you, Arno. It's always a joy to speak with you.

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