The Green Imagination

Plant Thinkers of 20th-Century Bengal by Sumana Roy explores how twentieth-century Bengali writers, artists, and scientists engaged with plant life to shape cultural, political, and philosophical perspectives beyond the nation-state framework. Excerpts:

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Abindranath Tagore's understanding of his own culture—and indeed of his own consciousness—is mediated through a belief in the Indian subcontinent as being a 'vast land of forests, or even a large forest.

When the first Aryan invaders appeared in India it was a vast land of forests, and the newcomers rapidly took advantage of them. These forests afforded them shelter from the fierce heat of the sun and the ravages of tropical storms, pastures for cattle, fuel for sacrificial fire, and materials for building cottages. And the different Aryan clans with their patriarchal heads settled in the different forest tracts which had some special advantage of natural protection, and food and water in plenty. Thus in India it was in the forests that our civilization had its birth, and it took a distinct character from this origin and environment.

What does it imply, when one sees an entire civilization as having originated in a forest? What makes it different from a civilization that, for instance, is biblically said to have found its birth in a garden, as the civilizational culture of Rabindranath's colonizer had?