Illustration by Abro
With South Asia’s notoriously hot, muggy summers come the fruit of the season, mangoes. Here, this delicious drupe is also known as ‘the king of fruits.’ The cultivation of mangoes is believed to have originated in South Asia. According to Mango: Botany, Production and Uses, the mango has been cultivated in the South Asian region for over 4,000 years. In the book Historical Geography of Crop Plants, Jonathan Sauer writes that the mango was first ‘domesticated’ in India in 2000 BCE. From here it made its way to East Asia. In the 16th century, it was introduced in various African and South American regions by European traders travelling from India. By 1860, it had made its way into North America.
During my recent visit to the US, a Pakistani-American lady told me that Mexican have flooded the US market and they were as good as Indian and Pakistani mangoes which mangoes most mango connoisseurs would find hard to believe. According to the 2018 brochure of Mexico’s ‘Champaign Mango’ brand, mangoes were first introduced in Mexico in the early 19th century by travellers from India.
Mangoes are now cultivated across South and East Asia, South and Central America, and even in China, where — according to an April 27, 2016 report in the Japan-based news magazine The Diplomat — the fruit was virtually unknown till it was brought there as a gift by Pakistani diplomats in the late 1960s.
Through political history the mango has often been a sweet diplomatic mediator
One essay in Mango: Botany, Production and Uses narrates that the mango entered East Asian regions from India with the spread of Hinduism and Buddhism. By the eighth century, the mango had also reached Baghdad, the centre of the powerful Abbasid caliphate.
The first Europeans to come across this fruit were the Portuguese. They arrived in India in the 15th century and found mangoes being cultivated and enjoyed with great relish. Garcia de Orta, a Portuguese physician and naturalist, who settled in Goa, India, in the 16th century, first wrote about mangoes in 1563. Since mangoes require a hot and humid climate to grow, the Portuguese took the fruit to Brazil. From there it began to spread to the rest of South and Central America. So, basically, the origin of almost each and every mango tree and fruit found anywhere in the world today is South Asia — especially the regions now known as the republics of India and Pakistan.
But nowhere else is the mango held in as much reverence as it is in India and Pakistan. Take for example how the self-professed love for mangoes by one of South Asia’s greatest Urdu/Persian poets, Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869), is celebrated over and over again. But even before that, there was the often repeated tale of the sixth century Hindu saint Karaikal Ammaiyar. According to Hindu legend, Karaikal’s husband sent her two mangoes to keep till he came back home. But when a yogi appeared and said he was hungry, she gave him one of the mangoes. After he finished eating it, another mango miraculously appeared. The legend claims that the yogi was the manifestation of the Hindu deity Shiva.
Indian food historian Vickram Doctor, in a June 10, 2017, article in the Economic Times, writes that mangoes in South Asia have also often been used as tools of diplomacy. According to Doctor, this was mainly the doing of India’s Mughal kings who, during their reign between the 16th and mid-19th centuries, greatly encouraged the plantation of mango trees across India. Nobles and growers would often gift Mughal kings crates of mangoes and expect favours in return.