Everyone loves a good mangifera indica or mango. It’s the emperor of all fruits. That’s why everyone should love a good book about mangoes.
Sopan Joshi has written one and he deserves congratulations not only for a good idea but also an excellent execution of that idea. It has a vast amount of useful and useless information that’s the hallmark of a book like this.
As an aside, it seems “China exported mangoes, fresh or dried, worth $59.43 million in 2023, according to data shared by the Chinese Embassy in India, quoting the country’s customs statistics.”
Some other online publications said Jawaharlal Nehru had presented China with mango saplings in 1955. So that’s one more thing we can blame him for.
Be that as it may, Joshi very admirably demonstrates in this book how Indians really love their mangoes. They drool and rhapsodise over them. That could be the reason why India exported only around $48 million worth. We probably ate up to ten times that.
Only a few are edible
He says there are around one thousand varieties but only a few are edible. He also suggests that it’s a good way of showing off if you can name some varieties that no one has ever heard of.
The best ones have a lot of sugar and a lot of pulp. Some even have skins that are thin enough to be eaten, the best dashehris for example. I have a tree in my backyard that gives such mangoes.
The Indian romance with mangoes goes back a long way. Aurangzeb apparently loved them and got into a very bad mood if he got bad ones. As a young prince he even fell in love with a girl who was eating one.
Not everyone had such a good experience. It seems Alexander’s soldiers ate so many green ones that many of them got diarrhoea. We will never know if that’s why he failed in India.
But it turns out that the mango flower can be quite intoxicating in an orchard. Joshi tells the story of a friend who got quite high on it. In modern parlance, stoned.
The mango generates its own con artists. A smart fellow in Nashik claimed that his mangoes made childless couples have babies and, indeed, that his mangoes could even assure the couple a male baby. When the police finally put him behind bars he was bailed out for ₹15,000.
Mangoes also make perfect ‘gifts’ or low level bribes. Joshi tells us about a shopkeeper who told him that he receives orders in the mango season to deliver boxes of alphonsos to important people.
Another shopkeeper told him how those fellows in glitzy malls in ties and smart shoes get paid ₹12,000 per month but he pays his own highly skilled sorters ₹30,000 a month.
Monkey menace
And then there are the monkeys. I know from experience with our single tree what a nuisance they are, damaging nearly a hundred mangoes each year.
There are places that give employment to around 80,000 people just to chase away the monkeys.
We are all familiar with the visuals of the actor Akshay Kumar eating mangoes with PM Narendra Modi. Joshi tells us something we don’t know, that there are some varieties named after him. One claims to be sugar free and ideal for diabetics.
To find out how this came about you will have to read the book.
Title: Mangifera indica: A biography of the Mango
Author: Sopan Joshi
Publisher: Aleph
Price: ₹799