343 Plants in the Literatures of India Sourit Bhattacharya In 1908, physicist and writer Jagadish Chandra Bose published an article in Modern Review titled ‘Automatism in Plant and Animal’. He argued in the piece that plants had a nervous system. Like an animal heart which beats repeatedly to live or a machine that ceaselessly converts energies to function, plants draw ‘automatic rhythmic activity of certain tissues’ from ‘the superfluity of energy absorbed from the environment’ to survive. 1 He ended the essay with a compulsive query: if living organisms act like machines, is life in this view ‘extremely materialistic’? To this, his rhetorical answer was: ‘Every living organism, in order to maintain its life, must stand in constant free communion with all the forces of the universe about it. Is this in truth materialism? Or is it spirituality? May it not be that we dispute these terms, because each of us is viewing a single fact from a different standpoint?’. 2 While the theory created a ripple in academic circles about the birth of a new area of research which was posthumously credited to Bose as plant neurobiology, I am keen on Bose’s response to his question on materialism: life draws its living pattern from acting like a machine which need not be seen as utilitarian or materialistic. Three years later, Bose went back to the question in a lecture on ‘Literature and Science’ at the Bengal Literary Conference. He proclaimed that while in the West after a period of synthesis, scientists were busy in the specialisation of knowledge, ‘The Eastern aim has been rather the opposite, namely that, in the multiplicity of phenomena, we should never miss their underlying unity’. 3 This non-dualist Vedantic tradition of monism is something Bose referred to throughout his life, i.e., to find unity and meaning – the essence of life – in the diversity of the living and the non-living beings. The spirituality of Bose’s views, at the time of nationalist rise in India, comes from his veneration for Indian epistemological systems that have reserved a special love for plants and the non-living. 1 Jagadish Chandra Bose, Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose: His Life, Discoveries and Writings (GA Natesan & Company, 1921), 135. 2 Bose, Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose, 138. 3 Bose, Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose, 61.