Mango: A fruit that unites and divides
July 22 is National Mango Day in India. Three mango aficionados meet to eat, agree to disagree about their favourite varieties, and explore the King of Fruits from multidisciplinary perspectives.
First, some slurpy facts about the mango.
Did you know that Indian Yellow, the pigment with which Vincent Van Gogh painted the luminous moon in his masterpiece Starry Night, was prepared from the dried urine of cows fed exclusively on mango leaves?
Or that India, despite being the world’s largest producer of mangoes, exports less than 1% because Indians can never be done eating their produce?
Or that we may be throwing away the most nutritious and medically valuable part of the mango — its seed?
The mango is undeniably the king of fruits, evoking passions that span literature, diplomacy, botany, agriculture, and economics. It is a fruit that unites and divides us equally, as we discover in this luscious episode of Unboxed, featuring a trio of mango aficionados who agree to disagree on their favourite variety.
It all began in Asia
The mango’s domestication goes back only about 4,000 years, which makes it pretty recent in recorded history compared to say, the domestication of cattle, which was about 10,000 years ago.
The genus Mangifera, which originates in tropical Asia, has about 64 species but most of the thousand-odd varieties of edible mangoes are derived from just one species - Mangifera indica. There are a few other edible species such as Mangifera casturi from Borneo, which is now extinct in the wild, and the zesty Mangifera zeylanica, the Sri Lankan wild mango. Some of these species are used in vegetative grafting processes to engender newer varieties.
From India, the mango travelled eastward towards China and Japan with the Buddhist monks, and it also travelled west to Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas with seafaring traders and conquerors.
Which brings us to the illumining fact that all the mango varieties that we know by various names have been created artificially by cross-pollinating or grafting different plants to derive certain desirable characteristics – like colour, taste, texture, aroma, etc.
Overthrow Alphonso supremacy!
One of the world’s best-known mangoes, the Alphonso, owes its origin to the zealous enterprise of the Portuguese Estado da India in the 16th century. Jesuit missionaries are thought to have grafted the indigenous ‘sucking mangoes’ of the coastal Konkan region varieties to produce this extraordinary horticultural masterpiece, which they named after Afonso de Albuquerque, the Portuguese Viceroy in India.
Not every mango-lover yields to the Alphonso supremacist. True-blue Bengalis abide by the nectar-like sweetness of the Himsagar, the pride of Bengal, which hardly ever leaves the borders of the eastern Indian state. In northern India, the Dasheri, Langra, Chausa, and other varieties hold court, while in southern India, the Imampasand, Benishan, Badami, Raspuri, Mulgoba, and other varieties have their own cult following.
Out shopping — and noshing — at the Mango Mela!
To research the many moods of the mango — and of mango lovers — for our show, we made a workday trip during the peak of a torrid summer to Lal Bagh, Bengaluru’s green lung, where the annual Mango Mela was being held. Trucks laden with aromatic fresh fruit trundled in. Farmers arranged their ware, carefully segregating them by age, quality, and variety. Customers trooped in and made a beeline for their favourite fruit. They sniffed, caressed, estimated, haggled, second-guessed, nibbled, chewed, slurped, and finally loosened their purse strings enough to return home burdened with bags and bags of well-earned loot.
We met a lot of lovely people — many were Bangaloreans while others were émigrés who have made themselves at home in this city’s welcoming climate. While they were united by a shared love for mangoes, they bickered and bantered over their favourite Imampasand, Dasheri, Alphonso, Badami, Langra, Raspuri, and more.
Our thanks to Anand, Aman, Azhar, Babu, Bhaskar, Deeksha, Deepali Karelia and Mamta Karelia, Dev Anand Paswan, Ishita, Kodandarama Reddy, Madhavarao Gideon and Lakshmi Gideon, Meenakshi, Navyashree, Prabhakar, Raghunathan, Shanthala, Srinivasan and Parvathi, Suresh, Swati, Vijayalakshmi, and others who kindly consented to be interviewed for this episode.
Here are a few outtakes for your listening pleasure:
Before you head off to polish off the last of the season’s harvest, take this poll.
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