Fruit of the Nation

THE CHAUSA, it is said, was a variety of mango loved by Sher Shah Suri, the man who almost stopped the Mughal empire taking off when he defeated Humayun. That battle happened in a place called Chausa in Bihar. There is even a date to it, June 26, 1539. A story about it says that the mango variety got renamed by him after the victory because his soldiers’ blood watered the trees there. As it turns out, it is a myth. When Sopan Joshi, in search of the Chausa’s origins, landed in the village it was also coincidentally June 26. He then got to speaking to the villag­ers and found that no one in this place where the mango was supposed to have originated, had even heard of the Chausa. He went to nearby villages and it was the same all over. After a few years, he found a book which spoke of another story—in a village in Uttar Pradesh’s Hardoi district from a seed that a crow dropped in front of a widow’s house, a tree gave such deli­cious mangoes that the Awadh nawab paid Rs 100 to her every year. The village of that widow was Cheensa, leading to with some linguistic inflexion, Chaunsa, perhaps then leading to Chausa. Joshi went and nobody knew of the Chausa there either. On the other hand, he met someone saying that the village was settled by soldiers from the battle. The origin remained a question mark.

This is one anecdote in a forest in the encyclopaedic treatise on the mango— Mangifera Indica: A Biography of the Mango (Aleph; 432 pages; ₹799)—that Joshi took eight years to write. The mango is associ­ated with the summer but around the middle of July is when the Chausa, one of the three main and the costliest north Indian varieties, hits the market. What leads to its allure? This is how he describes it in the book: “The Chausa’s skin is not the thinnest but is delicate and gets injured easily. Juice runs out when you cut a cheek. The flesh is a bright yellow and extraordinarily sweet; there is a little fibre in the flesh, especially close to the stone. Its aroma has notes of chalk, it is fragrant. It is a mango I like to eat alone at the table, involved, not distracted by anything.”

Throughout his innumerable inter­views and journeys chasing the mango, Joshi was struck by how malleable it was in mind, memory and myth. “I’ve even seen in academic papers that Sher Shah Suri was very fond of this variety and popularised it. The two have no connec­tion, but you can connect anything with the mango,” he says. The book is not just a factcheck or even about the fruit itself. Under its umbrella, Joshi weaves in strands like culture, literature, sociology, politics, geopolitics, botany, business, art, history, religion and even geology.

There are essentially two types of mango trees in India. One is the original inhabitant. A seed falls and a tree grows and gives fruit which has seed that then becomes another tree. There is no predict­ability that fruit from this next tree will be like the one from the earlier. There is then the second type. A seed falls, a sapling grows and then another branch from a fruit that tasted good is grafted onto it and that then leads to the same type of fruit with predictabil­ity. The fruits are bigger with more pulp and are usually the one that you buy from the market. The story of the takeover of grafted mango trees in India is the story of colonial conquests, industri­alisation and the alienation of land from its keepers. Perhaps the best-known variety that we know, the Hapus or Alphonso, is such a grafted mango. Its very name is believed to be from Afonso de Albuquerque, who served as Portugal’s governor in India be­tween 1509 to 1511. Jesuit priests brought in their grafting techniques and intro­duced them onto Indian mangoes creat­ing new fleshier varieties. The Mughals picked up on it until in modern times the fruit became increasingly industrialised with the grafted varieties.

Joshi says, “There is very old evidence of grafting in India (the book gives the example of Varahamihira writing about it in the 6th century) but grafting was not used on the mango. The mango tree was ubiquitous in ancient India. Every village, every city, had several mango groves around it. It was infrastructure. That’s the reason when Ashoka wants to do his own propaganda and tell people that he’s a good king, he says that he has got mango groves planted. Because an investment in the mango was considered an investment in the well-being of ordinary people. Into everybody’s wel­fare. This you will not come across now. Because we have stopped seeing fruits and groves as infrastructure.”

He finds the tree interwoven into the very fabric of Indian life for millennia. It was, according to him, the most generous form of social infrastructure. “All Indian villages and cities had mango groves, because a mango grove is where you went for a picnic, a celebration. A mango grove is where weddings happened. This has been going on forever. The other thing about the mango is it is sacred, but not overtly so. It’s not so sacred that you can’t cut it down or use it in any which way you want. In fact, in many communities, the ideal form of cremation—I have direct evidence from two places, Kerala and Mithila—is where when a person died, a seed-grown mango tree was cut down for the funeral.” When the Mughals came, they encouraged the folk culture of mango groves or left people alone to do what they wanted. But the British and the zamindari system they instituted changed the nature of land use in India. It destroyed the mango groves of ordinary people. They became preserves of the rich.

The mango infringes on India in unexpected ways. When new religions were born, it was a co-traveller. Like with Buddhism. In 637 CE, Hiuen Tsang came to India from China and went to Sarnath where the Buddha gave his first sermon after attaining enlighten­ment. He found a monastery there and wrote: “In the great enclosure is a vihara about 200 feet high; above the roof is a golden-covered figure of the Amra (mango) fruit.” Among the symbols that the Buddha was represented by in early scriptures were the mango tree and fruit. And when he died, his last night was in a mango grove in Kushi­nagar. “No single religion is as deeply embedded in the culture of the mango as Buddhism,” says Joshi.

The mango is used by the common man as bribes when he doesn’t have hard cash. In politics and diplomacy, it makes its influence felt in the form of gifts. A vil­lage that Joshi visited during his research was Rataul whose mango variety, also called Rataul, originated in an orchard belonging to one Anwar-ul-Haq. After Independence his son took the graft to Pakistan and there the variety became popular as Anwar Rataul. In 1981, the then Pakistan President Zia-ul-Haq sent a basket of these mangoes to Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi as a gift. When Rataul’s residents read about it they took a delegation to Gandhi to tell her that this was actually an Indian variety. When Joshi went there, Zahoor Siddiqui, on whose ancestral orchard the Rataul was born, showed him the original tree. He writes in the book: “Siddiqui pointed out the mother tree when I visited him in 2017. It stood there as a scraggy witness to the past.” From that tree’s echo, the mangoes had become a conciliatory gesture between two heads of enemy nations. The reason might be found in how Joshi describes the taste of the Rataul: “Plump with paper-thin skin, it has very little fibre close to its small stone. In many fine mangoes of North India, the sweetness often overwhelms the subtler elements of taste, leaving it only in the flesh close to the fibres of the stone. Not so with the Rataul! Its sweet flesh retains the more ephemeral notes. They disappear as quickly as the small mango disappears into your mouth.”

The book is divided into three sections. In the first, Joshi looks at how the mango weaves into the fabric of India. In the second, he looks at the science and trade of it. The third is a travelogue where he goes to get acquainted across the four parts of the country with the different varieties grown there. Nuggets line the road of what you thought was a familiar fruit. For instance, many would know the variety called Totapuri but not that it accounts for 90 per cent of everything that involves commercial pulp. In Chittoor, Andhra Pradesh Joshi meets a mango farmer who tells him that the Totapuri once used to be the mango of the poor, the cheapest, but then its potential for pulp became known. The fruit is free of fibre and can grow in hardy conditions. But the trick is that to the Totapuri’s pulp is added a little bit of Alphonso pulp to provide the flavour. Joshi says, “It’s only in the ’70s and ’80s that Totapuri catches on. Every time you have Maaza or Frooti, the fruit pulp in that is 90 to 95 per cent Totapuri to which 5 to 10 per cent of low-grade Alphonso, which doesn’t sell in the market, is added. Totapuri doesn’t have a dominant taste or flavour. It’s a very even mango.”

The mango business is not a stable one even in a country obsessed with it. Mango traders have a word for it—“kachcha”. “Because everything is unpredictable. You are always at the mercy of the weather. And markets are entirely designed for non-perishable items,” says Joshi.

It is not an entirely bleak picture either because he finds a new category of people getting involved with the fruit. Like Nestor Rangel, an electrical engineer who became an organic mango grower. He could have earned more with cashew but chose growing the fruit and on his orchard, there are 700 trees and 20 varieties. “They are not your standard characters. But when you go to them, you get shades of the old mango culture,” he says. Then there was Kongara Ramesh near Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh, a homeopath and farmer who had only studied till eighth standard. He learnt the science of plant breeding by himself and made new varieties that became popular like Swagatham. Another variety of his called Amrutham can be frozen, some­thing the fruit is not good at because it starts degrading. A line in the book by his daughter exemplifies the emotions the fruit can arouse. The three of them were in the orchard when Ramesh walked away to look at a tree. Joshi writes: “When he was out of earshot, Harita said her father did not come out to the orchard for two months after the destruc­tion of Cyclone Hudhud. ‘He was in mourning like he had lost a child.’”

booksfood culturefruitsMangifera Indica: A Biography of the MangoMangoesSopan Joshi