On Sopan Joshi's Mangifera Indica

This year, for the first time in my life, the mango became something more than an exciting and consoling and sensuous gustatory experience for me—to the point that I almost ceased to regard it as an object of consumption.

My teacher was a mango tree, planted in the 1980s in the small yard outside the house that my parents built in Bhubaneswar. Over the years I had come and gone many times without ever paying much heed to the parallel universe that it had created and sustained within its boughs. But now that I had a small library on the rooftop, every morning began with a few minutes within its aura, somehow both serene and ecstatic.I took to reading with its long green leaves gently rustling in the wind: fine music for the mornings. In January, thousands of small green flowers, packed into conical panicles, burgeoned on its branches. Slowly, their stalks turned a sindoori red—the colour of creativity and passion, revealing just why Kama is said to choose mango flowers for his arrows. Squirrels, birds, chameleons, bees,ants, and spiders buzzed within its canopy, a small society of ardent arboreals.

When I plucked a tiny subsection of flowers and pressed down on it with my fingernail, the ethereal tart fragrance of kachchi kairi rose to my nose. A few weeks later, tiny green fruit began to appear on the stalks. Whenever I left for a few days and returned, they had plumped out a bit more, dangling in small clusters, fed by fragrant sap running up from roots 70ft away.

Slowly they began to ripen. Their sun-facing sides turned yellow first: a daily demonstration of how heat and light from a faraway star metamorphose into life and colour and taste here on earth. In April and May, after three months of fruition, they became ripe and began to fall all around the house, to the great delight of passers-by. Their heads and shoulders were stained by sap. I only ate a few. I didn’t want to. Watery and much less complex than the best mango varietals, they had nevertheless proved to be a revelation of all the wonders of life.

Perhaps the only way to make the entire cycle more mangivorous would have been to spend those mornings reading Mangifera Indica, Sopan Joshi’s exuberant and magisterial survey of the influence of the mango on Indian life and thought. Joshi’s basic thesis, which he illustrates with infectious verve and detail, is that to us subcontinentals, the mango is much more than a fruit, it is an entire culture: a path back to childhood, an emblem of longing and desire and ecstasy, a non-verbal code of civilisation and culture, a roadway into myth and history.

Despite being so deeply embedded in our imaginations for millennia here is something mysterious and elusive about the mango. For instance, there is the unpredictable way in which it propagates.Mangoes grown from seed, or beeji mangoes, are very rarely “true to type”—the seed of a gulab khas or imam pasand does not yield a tree that has the same kind of fruit—and need the aid of “kalmi” or grafting for mass-scale production for a consumer base as large as India’s. Again, there is the frequent disjunction between looks and taste: many of the best varietals are nondescript to the eye. There is a sense of insufficiency associated with mangoes, even when we can eat as many as we like. India is too big a country and the fruit too mercurial a personality for it to travel to distant markets. There will always be more varietals that we haven’t tasted than those that we have.

Among the lovely details that Joshi offers is that just like Indians themselves, south Indian varietals often do well when transplanted to the north, but the reverse is rarely true. Joshi sprinkles many such charming facts and references along his rambling journey (he drives a Harley Davidson to many far-flung mango orchards). In the seventh century CE, the Chinese traveller Hsuan Tsang travelled to Sarnath, where he mentions visiting a large vihara with a golden figure of a mango above the roof. “Buddha’s concerns were universal and existential,” glosses Joshi. “He needed the kind of metaphors that turn abstract ideas into imaginable forms.” In Jharkhand’s Chaibasa, Joshi meets Kunwar Singh Janko, a tribal in search of the land holdings of his ancestors in the sal forest. Two ways of identifying such lands are tombstones and old mango trees.

Even Gandhi, who resisted the call of sensuality and temptation all his mature life, struggled to eliminate mangoes from his diet. “We must get used to not treating it with so much affection,” he writes sternly in a letter from 1941. Mirza Ghalib would never have agreed. More than 35 kinds of mango are cited in his own letters.

The mango also has an extensive literature of its own. Much of it is throwaway journalism; another large part comprises highly technical and dry scientific papers. So it’s worth focusing on where Joshi breaks new ground. Most writers on the mango (myself included) have only situated the mango within a human-centric history of taste; Joshi opens out the frame to locate it within a history of life itself.“The influence of fruit (on life) is very deep,” he writes, as he shows how plants and animals and human beings have co-evolved over tens of thousands of years.

In this view of things, primates (the genus of living creatures which includes apes and human beings) developed colour vision to find the brightly coloured fruits of the tropical rainforest, the seeds of which in turn we dispersed far and wide—sometimes across entire continents. (On my first morning in Brazil a few years ago, I came across a mango lying broken open on a stone pathway on the island of Itaparica. I picked it up and it smelled like no mango that had ever come my way—it had become Brazilian.)

“We do not like to see ourselves as primates shaped by fruiting trees,” Joshi writes. We would rather believe today that it is we humans who have shaped and ordered the world of the mango. But the long-historical record proves otherwise. “It was the plants that began hitting on animals,” Joshi writes—a fact we still acknowledge when we raise a mango to our noses to detect whether it is ripe. Thinking about mangoes in the widest possible frame requires that we “lift ourselves out of human solipsism and join biology’s dance to the music of deep time.” At moments like this Joshi’s writing approaches the ecstatic tremors found in the work of Stephen Jay Gould, David Quammen and Timothy Ferris.

The other noteworthy aspect of Joshi’s book is his insightful survey, based on extensive legwork and discussions with mango growers and traders (whom he allows to speak in their own voice), of the problems that plague the Indian mango industry. Most mango orchards in India, he notes, are not tended by their owners; many were acquired in the years after independence as a way of evading the strictures of the Land Ceiling Act. Today they are given out on contract, but an indifferent landlord never made for productive and well-tended land. In contrast, the passion and sense of purpose and awareness of tradition found in the best mango-growers is truly life-affirming. 

It is always a big claim to say of a book that it will still be read in a hundred years. But it is hard to imagine that there will ever be a better literary companion to the mango than Mangifera Indica.

This essay appeared recently in Mint Lounge.