On Attunement and Multispecies Cohabitation

Sumana Roy's eco-memoir, How I Became a Tree, explores her imaginative kinship (sahrydaya) with mid-twentieth-century Indian painter Nandalal Bose. Reflecting on Nandalal's instructions on painting arboreal life, Roy writes:

Roy returns to this passage from Nandalal's Vision and Creation in her recent Plant Thinkers of Twentieth Century Bengal, where she writes that his practice of drawing a tree upward shows how “[i]n drawing a tree, one should become a tree” (S. Roy 2017: 182, italics mine).

I begin with these segments to introduce a key concept for this book: attunement. Roy associates both her and Nandalal's sahrydaya with “empathy” and “identification…border-crossing” (Black 2010) emotional acts where the self reaches out and begins to see herself in the other. However, there is something more than empathy and identification in these passages where Roy traces her arborophilic genealogy: Nandalal's musings on painting trees represent a process of attuning oneself into the life processes of a nonhuman other. Roy remains “unsure whether Nandalal has become the tree or he has made the tree become Nandalal …” (2017: 37).