Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose, His Life and Speeches

Published in Madras by Ganesh & Co. in 1920, this volume pairs a long life of the Bengali physicist and plant physiologist with twenty-five of his lectures, addresses and newspaper-reported speeches. The biography follows Bose from a village school in Bengal to St. Xavier’s in Calcutta and Christ’s College, Cambridge, then to his 1890s work on electric waves a few millimetres long, the two-thirds salary he drew at Presidency College because he was Indian, and the Bose Institute, built with his life savings and dedicated in 1917. The speeches that follow include “Invisible Light”, “Plant Response”, “The Voice of Life” and his evidence to the Public Services Commission. They keep returning to one argument: that plants feel, tire and recover, and that Indian laboratories deserve to be taken seriously.