Plants in the literatures of India

Trees and plants have been venerated for centuries in India as cosmic providers of life and energy. In the modern periods, these sentiments have dominated literary and cultural works. In Toru Dutt’s poetry, we see a heartrending call to trees as fabricating nostalgia for family histories. From Jagadish Chandra Bose’s epoch-defining scientific discovery that plants have life to Rabindranath Tagore’s philosophical and ecological meditations on preserving forested life-systems, Indian writers in the twentieth century have paid respect to trees as meaningful antidote to expansive agricultural and industrial-based deforestation. In the late colonial and post-colonial contexts of aggressive material development and prophetic resistance in literature, plant-based prose work by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Ismat Chughtai, or Bama, poetry of Gieve Patel or Mamang Dai, or experimental works by Sumana Roy or Kalpna Singh-Chitnis have variously offered significant imaginative mediums through which to reflect upon the complex and sacred dynamic of human–non-human relationship in India.