Diary: Sumana Roy, Do Trees Laugh?

Inanimate Scream, Inanimate Nature Responding to the Professor’s Musings (1921), watercolor on paper. From the series of comic sketches, Reform Screams, on the work of Jagadish Chandra Bose, by painter and cartoonist Gaganendranath Tagore. Reproduced in Modern Review, July 1921

In early spring of last year I discovered that plants “cry” when they are deprived of water or injured. Researchers, writing about their experiments with tomato and tobacco plants in the journal Cell, had proved that “stressed plants emit airborne sounds” between 40 and 80 kilohertz, the reason humans cannot hear them. I thought immediately of two things. The first was Jagadish Chandra Bose, a scientist who, working in his lab in colonial Calcutta a hundred years ago, designed instruments to record plant response to various kinds of external stimuli, using a register of emotions reserved almost exclusively for humans. His research was revolutionary, both in thinking to record what he called the plant’s “handwriting” and, even more importantly, in rejecting the adopted dry voice of science journals for a humane vocabulary of thrill, desire, wonder, and love. The second thing I thought of was a joke in my family: how can someone like me—whose strongest pull is toward humor, toward people who make me laugh—be so attracted to plant life, living beings without humor at all?

Jagadish Bose, interested in understanding the “language” of plants, recorded their responses to external stimuli, particularly what he called “injury.” The torulipi—plant script—that his instruments recorded were, quite obviously, of a plant under stress. If recent research proves Bose’s deductions from more than a century ago, that plants “cry,” does it leave out the possibility of laughter in the plant world?

Humans seem to have heard trees laughing. This is from Amit Chaudhuri’s song “Laughter,” written and composed in the late 1970s, when he was in his late teens.

I heard the laughter of the trees
I heard them laughing endlessly
I walked with my eyes hanging down
I thought they were laughing at me

Was it a dream in which I heard
All in my mind all in my mind
And though I walked on I could not
Leave my loneliness behind

Who can forget the laughter?
Who can forget the trees?
Who who saw them swaying
Laughing laughing at me?

And as I walked I saw the leaves
Fall like dying stars below
Across my eyes across my soul
I felt a wind begin to blow

And all was silent like the sky
And all was still just as the sea
But only only as I cried
The trees were laughing endlessly

I’ve always been moved by the song, moved by its beauty as much as by the awareness that a teenager is writing it. Hearing it I thought, can living beings without eyes respond to the world with laughter?

Chaudhuri’s song is neither personification nor pathetic fallacy, two easy ways to write about those with whom we do not share a language. It takes the laughter of trees to be as natural as the laughter of humans, imagining that all living beings have access to laughter, that everything that breathes, has a living relationship with air, can laugh. It is at this moment that something integral to my consciousness rises to the surface—my relationship with the rasa theory, a theory of art emotions that goes back to the ancient sage Bharata’s Natya Shastra. Bharata, basing his theory on the plays that he had watched, identified eight rasas: shringar, hasya, raudra, karuna, veera, bhayanaka, bibhatsa, adbhuta (love, laughter, anger, sorrow, heroism, fear, disgust, wonder). The Kashmiri thinker and aesthete Abhinavagupta added a ninth about five centuries later: shanta, peace.

When I teach the rasa theory to my students, we often discuss their human-centeredness, we wonder whether we could imagine the same set of emotions and responses in a world beyond humans. Jagadish Bose was mocked for his claims about plant sentience. There’s also a binary in Amit Chaudhuri’s song that is bound to trouble us emotionally—the “I” cries, the trees “laugh endlessly.” This cruel laughter of plant life—as I run through the other (art-)emotions on the list of rasas, I think of scientists in the hundred years since Jagadish Bose working towards proving that plants do indeed “feel” feelings related to stress and, consequently, impending death.

The leaves of the touch-me-not fold when touched. You tickle the trunk of a tree called a gudgudi—tickle—tree in Uttarakhand, and the leaves on the branches begin to move. “At first you think that it might be the wind tickling it,” says the environmental journalist from whose video I first learn about such a tree in Katarniaghat, “Then you realize that it’s not the air, for the leaves of no other tree in its surroundings are moving.” This is the thing—that the tree’s response to the air, as in the shiver of the leaves, does not surprise us, but its response to tickling does.

Charles Darwin, in trying to understand laughter and its place in evolution, argued that our response to tickling is not very different from our response to a joke. One must be in a “light” state of mind to be able to respond to both with laughter, he insisted; and, of course, surprise is necessary to produce laughter. Did he mean to imply that only those with “minds” were capable of laughter? We know that many animals are ticklish. But trees?

As scientific research reveals a new history of emotions in plant studies, I wait to hear the laughter of the trees.

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Sumana Roy’s latest book, Provincials, is published today! We featured her arboreal reflection How I Became a Tree in Book Post in 2021. She has also written in Book Post about exhaustion and the sixteenth-century poet Surdas, and she is the author of a novel, a book of stories, and two books of poetry. She is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University, outside of New Delhi.

Editor’s notes: Sumana Roy will be speaking virtually on April 2 with Mary Evelyn Tucker, co-director of the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology, at a spring launch for Orion magazine.

Also, as it happens, next month NYRB Classics will publish Amit Chaudhuri’s first three novels, A Strange and Sublime Address, Afternoon Raag, and Freedom Song, featuring a Chaudhuri-like character as a child and young person in India and at Oxford. Amit Chaudhuri will be appearing at the end of April and early May in Chicago, Cambridge, New York, Pittsburgh, and Indiana.

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