Thousands of years ago, amid the monsoon rains and tropical heat of South Asia, humans stumbled upon a wild, evergreen tree that bore a most luscious fruit: mango. Eventually, they took to growing it themselves, selecting and sowing the seeds from trees that produced the finest fruit. Over time, the mango became a way of life in the Indian subcontinent. So, it’s no surprise that mentions of the mango abound in the pages of the subcontinent’s history, in its cuisines, religious traditions, healing systems, literature, art and architecture.

Varieties

From Hapus and Dashehari to Banganapalli and Langda, thousands of varieties of mango grow across India and there are endless arguments over which of these is the best. However, as Sopan Joshi discloses in his book Magnifera Indica: A Biography of the Mango, agricultural experts boil down all this variety into two broad ways of growing and eating mangoes.

For most of its history, the mango tree was grown from seed. Humans plucked and ate a tasty mango and sowed its seed, hoping to reap a rich harvest of the delicious fruit. But there is no guarantee that a tree grown from the seed of a delicious mango will bear fruit that tastes the same.

In the 16th century, Portuguese Jesuit priests in India popularised the practice of grafting mangoes. Once a sapling grew from the seed, they grafted a branch from the parent tree onto it. This ensured that the tree turned into a clone of its parent and produced the same kind of fruit. Most mangoes you buy from the market today are usually grown from grafts.

What about the ways of eating mangoes? The oldest variety of mangoes is the sucking type, with pulp so soft that one can simply poke a hole at the top and suck out the thin juice! The other variety has thicker pulp that can be bitten into. This difference is so old that even Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire, noticed it when he arrived in the Indian subcontinent during the 16th century. There wasn’t much that impressed him about the place, but the mango endeared itself even to the demanding Babur!

Around the world

The soft, delicate fruit, prone to bruising and rotting, isn’t the easiest traveller. But enamoured humans, especially traders, have been carrying it beyond the Indian subcontinent from the earliest times. Grafting only made this easier, and it’s no surprise that the Portuguese, who are credited with popularising mango grafting, also became its global patrons. They took the fruit as far as Brazil between the 16th and 17th centuries. Nevertheless, India remains its top producer, and no Indian summer is complete without a bounty of mangoes!