How ancient groves, sacred rites and regional varieties shaped India's eternal obsession with mangoes

Mint

6 hours ago

Why the mango? What is it about this fruit?
For all of our innumerable comestibles, nothing generates excitement in India like the mango. It can't be just the sweet taste of fruity flesh. No gustatory appeal can explain the unequalled hysteria over the mango.
Does any fruit or plant have a comparable relationship with a country as does the mango with India? The cherry blossom in Japan? While the earliest references to sakura go back more than a thousand years, hanami or the viewing of flowers became a national-level mega event only after the Meiji restoration in 1871.
The mango blossom in India? Emperors were advertising their sponsorship of mango groves in the third century BCE. Ancient Sanskrit literature depicts Indians going mad over the mango flower in communal revelry and festivities that are difficult to imagine today. Sports competitions, communal intoxication and ecstatic dance and music was linked with what was perhaps ancient India's greatest celebration, the two-month-long spring festival, Vasantotsava. Its symbol was the mango flower, also the sign of good luck in the new year, since most lunar calendars began in the spring, when the mango flowers. Really, the Olympic games of ancient Greece might struggle to compete for scale.
Sure, Canada has the maple leaf on its flag since 1965, and its maple symbolism goes back to the 19th century. But the Ashoka Chakra on our flag—itself going back to the Mauryan times—is an interpretation of Gautam Buddha's Dharmachakra, first articulated in a deer park that is now Sarnath. The first drafts of our great sceptical traditions like Buddhism and Jainism were created and preached in ancient mango groves of the Gangetic plains, in which ascetics like Gautama Buddha and Mahavira spent their lives. When the Chinese monk Hiuen Tsang (or Xuanzang) visited Sarnath in 637 CE, he saw above the 200-foot vihara the golden figure of a mango fruit, representing the Buddha.
FRUIT WITH ANCIENT ROOTS
From history to taste. The thorny (and stinky) durian fruit is a worthy adversary to India's mango. It is called the king of fruits in Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand. There are even a few festivals to celebrate its taste, which has an immense appeal in the region; its popularity has expanded to China recently. But almost every Indian city must have its signature mango festival, if not multiple festivals. For all its exquisite taste, the durian struggles to compete with the mango's varietal wealth and range of tastes and flavours. Just one species, Mangifera indica, had 1,682 documented cultivars across the world in 2010; India has more than a thousand. Two researchers found signs of mango residue on kitchen implements from a site of the Indus Valley Civilisation, dated to 2600-2200 BCE.
Sure, the apple has even more varieties—upwards of 7,000—and is grown extensively across the world's temperate climes. It features in ancient accounts from China to Greece. But the apple's role is primarily that of a fruit. In ancient accounts, the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge is not the apple. It is undefined in the Old Testament; it is wheat or gandum in the Islamic canon. The connection between the apple and the Fall of Adam and Eve owes to painters of the European renaissance; this happened after the modern apple was derived from landraces and spread across Europe in the middle ages. A temperate fruit that evolved to resist the cold, the apple is stored and transported across the world in cold chains. For all its varietal wealth, you will not find an apple that tastes like a mango; yet, in Karnataka, you can taste a mango that tastes like apples. And you don't need to say 'a mango a day keeps the doctor away". The mango doesn't need an appeal to hypochondria. It commands attention by offering pleasure supreme.
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Neither the durian nor the apple can hold a fruit-scented candle to the intensity and scope of the mango's cultural appeal across India, nay, South Asia. (For good measure, you can throw into the bargain the guava of Latin America and bananas of all sorts). The mango can sustain entire departments of cultural studies. There are numerous books and articles just on the cultural history of the mango and its presence in the arts.
TURN OVER AN OLD LEAF
Consider the mango leaf. The toran or bandhanwar hung on the doors of Hindu households for any auspicious occasion is merely a string of mango leaves; the purnakalasha with mango leaves sanctifies every auspicious occasion; festoons of mango leaves are essential for the wedding mandap; and customs of marrying mango trees are found in tribal and non-tribal groups. (In Bahraich, Uttar Pradesh, it has been absorbed into the cult of Ghazi Miyan, who is symbolically married under a mango tree during his urs.)
In several communities across India, a proper cremation meant the cutting down of a seedling mango tree to make a funeral pyre. Even today, in havans across the country, the sacred fire is made of mango wood (you can buy it off e-commerce sites now). Since each part of the mango tree has so many uses, planting a mango was a deed of great punya (virtue/merit); each generation planted mango trees to be used by generations to come.
When you peek into the traditions of India's forest-dwelling tribes, the mango's role becomes even more central. It is a sacred tree, the most common embodiment of the (unspecified) Kalpavriksha, the tree of wish-fulfilment and plenitude that emerged from the churning of the ocean in the Puranic Samudra Manthan story. Yet it is not as sacred as the banyan or the sacred fig. It can be cut, harvested, grafted, manoeuvred, sacrificed, celebrated, enjoyed. The mango bears fruits sacred and profane. It is linked with all manner of reformers, sages, deities. It's not just Jainism or Buddhism that thrived in mango groves. All Puranic and Tantric traditions overflow with references to the mango.
THE TREE OF THE GOD OF DESIRE
Early Vedic accounts don't mention the mango. But no deity is as closely linked to the mango as Kamadeva, a Vedic deity. Depicted as a fetching young man, he is the divinity of desire, pleasure, wish-fulfilment, love, sex and procreation. (His Greco-Roman counterparts are Eros and Cupid.) He is Brahma's first-born, emerging from the creator's mind, charged with spreading love.
This he does by shooting arrows made of five flowers: ashoka, lotus, lily, jasmine and—his weapon of choice—mango. His bow is made of sugarcane; the string is made of honeybees. He rides a brightly coloured parakeet. His wife is Rati, goddess of sexual pleasure, also called Priti, meaning love. Their children are Harsha (joy) and Yasha (fame/glory). His friend is Vasanta (spring), the king of seasons. He is linked to Shringar or adornment, the king of the nine rasas.
Kamadeva comes with more names than the number of mango varieties you can count; each name has an elaborate backstory. After he shot an arrow of mango flower at Shiva, he was burnt for his mischievous ways. The world turned loveless. Rati, along with Parvati, pleaded to Shiva; he revived Kamadeva on the condition that the trouble-making god remain invisible, existing only in spirit. Each year, however, in the festival of spring, the god of love becomes embodied in the mango's inflorescence.
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One of his names is Madana, meaning intoxicating. Baur means flower in many northern languages; unless specified, it means the mango flower and the spring festival. The baur or mango flowers have been driving India seasonally crazy for thousands of years, to the point that the verb baurana means going crazy with joy in several languages. Another name for the two-month Vasantotsava was Madanotsava, the season to go mad with joy and desire. The mango flowers provided the enabling backdrop of seduction, driving human procreation. The fertility of the spring flowers produces the fruit in the summer.
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Indian pupils tend to dilate at the mere mention of the mango. Most people lapse into nostalgia, drawing emotional connections from their childhood. They rapture on about the mango's connections with their family relations, without actually knowing what's driving them on. We absorb cultural memes unquestioningly, lacking any knowledge of their hows and whys.
We grow up feeling excited about mangoes without an awareness of their connection with Kamadeva (and desire) or the Buddha (and victory over desire). 'Mango, the king of fruits", is a common essay topic in our primary and secondary schools. It doesn't disappear with age.
It isn't enough to get your favourite mangoes and consume them; you will feel compelled to let others know of it. (Cue reels and posts on social media.) Not just that, either. Many feel the compulsion to run down other mangoes, others' mangoes. The IPL season is now followed by the Indian Mangivory League, a season with its own breathless commentators and an assortment of cheerleaders. Look up #MangoWars on social media. To insult a person or a region, you merely need to put down their signature mango varieties. You cannot insult a person or a city or a region by insulting its apples and oranges. The mango shoulders burdens other fruits cannot imagine. Bengaluru-based scholar and author Venu Madhav Govindu calls it 'mango chauvinism", adding that in our pop culture, the mango is like cricket; everybody has an opinion on it without actually knowing it.
Our age has fangled a weird variant of this peculiar Indian compulsion. Almost all mango talk centres on 'varieties". (It becomes varietiyaan in Uttar Pradesh). The number of varieties is very important to underscore range. Each of the innumerable mango festivals held each summer advertises the number of varieties it showcases. You can impress other people by the number of varieties you have tasted. Growers make it a point to let you know that they have trees of this many varieties.
The other side of this varietal discourse is the exclusivity of special types of mangoes. For example, in Mumbai or Pune, you will meet people claiming the Alphonso or Hapus is the king of all mangoes, which itself is the king of all fruits. Be tolerant! They are riffing off essays they wrote in school, padding it with the most readily accessible cliches. For example, a well-educated and knowledgeable man in Goa said it was the Portuguese who brought the mango to India. In Karnataka, you will hear the claim that Tipu Sultan brought the fine mangoes grown there from Iran. Fictional stories find a lot more purchase than non-fiction built on research.
HAPUS HYSTERIA
Now the Alphonso is a very fine mango, indeed. But not all Hapus are the same. The produce from Sindhudurg and Ratnagiri districts is particularly prized. But even in the orchards of Konkan, there's a difference in the taste of mangoes growing in different parts of the same orchard. Growers will tell you that the finest Hapus come from trees planted in holes blasted into the weathered laterite hard rock (kaatal in Marathi).
This practice began only in the 1960s; it came from agricultural scientists looking to grow something of value in the otherwise unproductive hard rock. Trees here do not bear too many fruits, especially when compared to those growing in the valleys or greener surroundings. Their fruits are more vulnerable to 'spongy tissue", a disorder peculiar to the Alphonso. That's because the conditions are terribly harsh for trees growing in the sea-facing rocks. It is much hotter than in the valleys, not to mention the stiff offshore winds. But it's such trees, facing hostile conditions, that produce the finest Hapus.
Your neighbourhood Mumbaikar or Puneri is unlikely to know this. He or she buys the mango off the market and basks in the reflected hype. They don't realise how this hysteria is destroying the object of their love. In their desperation to recover investments, mango growers resort to unscrupulous use of synthetic chemicals for a range of reasons. Such market-driven compulsions have dramatically hit the quality of not just the Alphonso but almost all prized varieties across the country over the past decade or two.
Pesticide residues lead to rejection of export consignments, besides forcing people to consume small amounts of these poisons each time they have a mango. Traders wish to hit the markets with the season's produce as early as possible in the season. They pressure the growers to harvest early, before the fruits have matured. This unripe fruit is collected and sold by a string of wholesalers to retailers. The retailers ripen the fruit and sell it to the customers. A bulk of Alphonso retailers in Mumbai come from eastern Uttar Pradesh (UP) just for the mango season, living in small rented accommodations, sleeping in hammocks above ripening fruits. Many of them ripen the fruit using banned chemicals—because it's faster. The greater the hype, the more short-cuts are taken at each level of the value chain.
A MANGO BY ANOTHER NAME
Then there is the obsession over the names of mango varieties. Social media is awash with mango maps of India, locating and allocating mango varieties by region. Such maps are circulated widely. Each map has several errors of name and location.
For example, some might tell you that the Langda and the Malda are different varieties. You can let them know that the variety is called 'Laingda" in Malda district of West Bengal. It's in Bihar that the same variety is called Malda or Maldah, and another name for it is Kapooriya, which itself is used for a few other varieties. In western UP, the variety again becomes known as Langda.
Some names are terribly confusing, like Safeda and Badam. Benishan, a variety from Andhra Pradesh (AP), is sold across the country. It is called Badam in Maharashtra and Safeda in northern India. But in AP, Telangana and Karnataka, Badam means Alphonso. And there is another variety called Badam in many parts of southern India. Since the Benishan is believed to have originated in an orchard of Banginapalle, it is also known by the name of the village. Meanwhile, the Safeda is actually a small-sized variety from Malihabad near Lucknow, but in Delhi and Punjab, it is called Dinga.
In mango maps circulated each summer, you might see different entries for Siroli, Bambai, Bambaiya and Bombay Green. This is the same variety, which shows slightly different traits from region to region, quite like the Langda/Malda. In fact, in northern Bihar, there is a red-and-yellow tinged variety called Durga Bhog, which is a kind of Bambai. In AP, a different mango is called Siroli. Several mangoes that have a red-coloured tinge get called Surkha or Sindura, although there are separate varieties by both names.
You might see Amrapali located in Odisha and Mallika located in Karnataka, for their respective popularity in each state. Both these varieties were developed in the 1970s on the campus of the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) in Delhi. Both are crosses of Dashehri from UP and Neelam from Tamil Nadu. But Neelam is used for different varieties in other parts of the country. People can identify a handful of mango types they have seen. Residents of Mumbai don't get to taste the best mangoes from Goa, Gujarat or Karnataka, forget about faraway regions.
People in UP have no idea about the finest mangoes of Bihar. In the two districts of Champaran is grown a small, plump variety called Zarda. It is not known across the border in eastern UP. Darbhanga in northern Bihar and Murshidabad in West Bengal are perhaps the two greatest centres in the history of fine mangoes. The variety of tastes and flavours in mangoes here is astounding. Yet you will not even hear of Champa, Rani Pasand, Bimli or Kohitoor outside of Murshidabad. Bihar has two popular varieties that come very late: Sipiya and Sukul. Both are deeply loved and sought after in Bihar. Outside, they are not known.
In fact, along with Bihar, AP is the only state where sucking-type mangoes have a commanding presence. Like in Bihar, people from AP and Telangana love their juicy mangoes consumed by the bucket. Even their names are poetic: Panchadhara Kalasham (sugar pot), Pandhurivari Mamidi (mango from Pandhuri-side), and there are a range of Rasalu-type varieties. If you look at the map of the mango's genetic diversity, six out of the seven regions with a wealth of wild mangoes are in eastern or southern India (see box below).
Most of the country has forgotten the joys of juicy sucking-type mangoes, in favour of table-type varieties that now dominate the market. IARI scientists have a list of 24 varieties that have commercial value. A few of these get discussed, most are not mentioned. Even within this narrow range, the best mangoes seldom go far from where they are grown.
If you truly enjoy your mangoes and are willing go the distance for fine taste, there's still only one way: make friends with mango-growers and get mature but unripe mangoes from them; thereafter, ripen them carefully at home. We need to actually earn our mangoes.
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The real reason we get so excited about the mango doesn't lie in classical Sanskrit dramas, or the ancient sceptical schools of asceticism, or the outstanding Mughal stewardship of orchards that produce fine fruits, or the commendable horticultural skills of Jesuit priests in 16th century Goa. It has to do with the mango's pivotal role in ordinary life. For most of history, our cities and villages were dotted with mango groves on common lands, often called amrai. These offered a lot much more than fruits or flowers or leaves or timber. They were the central infrastructure of community life. Amrais were so dense, sunlight never penetrated them; the mango has been the preferred shade tree of this hot country since forever.
The amrai is where all manner of community activities occurred. This is where wedding parties or baraat (a contraction of var-yatra or the groom's travelling party) stayed. Weddings were solemnised in amrais. From wrestling competitions to beit-bazi contests, from dance and music to feasts associated with varied festivals. And, of course, the mango grove was central to the spring festivities of Vasantotsava and its numerous events like Holi. The fruit was one of many joys that came from mango groves.
In the peak of summer in northern India, many people spent all their time in mango groves; in a time without electricity, fans or air-conditioners, these were cooler than any other parts of villages. This was happening till the 1970s. (Remember Basanti and Veeru cavorting in the mango grove of the 1975 blockbuster Sholay.) Naturally, the mango was associated with community joy and celebration, in cities as well as villages. From the spring festivities of the ancient times, to the weddings of modern India.
Apart from all the innumerable uses of the mango tree, its groves were the centres of community life and collective joy. Till two or three generations ago. Under British colonial rule, zamindars began felling these groves. Whatever remained was cut down after India's independence, either for land distribution or encroachment. The excitement over the mango has to do with matters far bigger than fine fruits. It has to do with the community life and joy that we have lost as a people.
The memory of that joy, however, hasn't gone, even as the groves have all been cut down. We try to find it in mangoes grown and traded with utter indifference in orchards owned by absentee landlords. If you listen carefully, you can hear a dirge under the breathless commentary over the mango.
That's why the mango. That's why nothing else.
An independent journalist in Delhi, Sopan Joshi is the author of Mangifera indica: A Biography of the Mango (2024).
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