Book Review: Sopan Joshi's 'Mangifera Indica' Is A Treat For Mango Lovers

With mangoes galore in my village home, I lie down on charpoy, flipping through a comprehensive story of the fruit. A journey of mango from its wild origins to the gourmets delight. Hundreds of unique varieties spread over Indian subcontinent, and many of them still hidden from the rest of the world. Author and journalist Sopan Joshi has penned down struggles and conquests of the succulent delectable fruit in his latest book- Mangifera Indica: A biography of the mango (Aleph book company. 2024).

Since I grew up roaming in orchards, climbing mango trees, plucking the fruit prudently from its acidic sappy stems, suffering from mango rashes, and gobbling on kilos of fruit, the book was an obvious pick. Yet, I had a surprising revelation about my aloofness to the vast world of mangoes. Neither tasted the ultra-delicate Kohitoor from Murshidabad, which was kept in cotton wool, preserved in honey and sliced with bamboo knives; nor the caramel flavoured fleshy Mankurad from Goa.

Sopan Joshi, himself from Malwa region in central India, travels across the length and breadth of the country, talking to umpteen of experts. Right from so-called illiterate gardeners to the risk-taking Maratha traders and eminent agriculture scientists. The author takes on more of a narrative role with his inquisitive mango reportage, than a self-proclaimed expert on the subject.

He has divided the volume in three sections. In the first section, he moves quite deftly from personal memories to casual interactions, and gradually delves into the cultural aspects of fruit. He takes the reader to a marriage between mango and mahua tree in Bihar, mango leaves crowning banana pillars in South India, and unique legend of Ghazi Miyan from Bahraich.

The second section is rigorously scientific when he pours in cumbersome details about geology, paleobotany and human evolution. In spite of being from science (precisely medicine) background, I had to furtively skip through this academic read. Although, it suddenly looks worthwhile when he comes back to mangoes after a tedious circumambulation.

Third section is the most interesting encore when he travels in four directions, tastes mangoes from Mithila region in North Bihar to down south in Tamil Nadu, and from Konkan coasts to Bengal. He mentions, “The best maintained orchard I got to see was at Vennangupattu in Kanchipuram district of Tamil Nadu, 115 kilometres south of Chennai.” It was a pleasant surprise to find a passing reference about my own village Sarisab Pahi, and King Akbar’s magnificent orchard of 0.1 million trees in Darbhanga district. Author even finds a mango orchard in the middle of desert, where the soil has been brought from historical Indus valley!

He shares interesting anecdotes about love of mangoes among Mughal rulers from Babar to Aurangzeb, leaders from Mahatma Gandhi to Atal Bihari Vajpayee, poets and musicians from Mirza Ghalib to Bhimsen Joshi and industrialist like Dhirubhai Ambani. He also reveals about how mango served as ice-breaker in international trade and political conflicts, time and again.

Sopan Joshi shows his journalistic acumen, when he forays through streets and godowns of mango trade, identifying the bottlenecks and pinpointing why India, the largest producer of mangoes, lags behind some minion lands in export. His research is so extensive that the book could well have another title - Mangonomics.

Ardent lover of mangoes (who isn’t?) can probably miss the reference of one or other mango they tasted in childhood. I missed the mention of colourful and fibrous Gulabkhaas, but that explains the sheer vastness of topic. Probably an appendix with list of mangoes in each region would have helped but that would be too conventional and academic approach.

Sopan Joshi seems to shrug off eternal north-south debate on ‘Whose mango is the best?’. He arguments-

“You cannot insult a person or a city or a region by insulting their bananas or oranges or grapes…For all its entertainment value, the North-South mango debate is the noise of two players arguing loudly when the match is taking place elsewhere.”

Yet, he indulges in this debate as a neutral umpire from central India. Bambai and Jardaalu could have been my personal choices for the fray, but the author has been pretty unbiased in his book avoiding any such ranking. He seems to pick up qualities of each variety and savor them with delight, as he writes,

“No matter how much you might have spent on an exotic variety, a child somewhere might be running away with the perfect mango they got off a tree or a ripening pile while the caretaker wasn’t looking. In that risk lies the purest joy.”

A non-fiction with such personal touches makes the book a good read, also beyond the season of our favorite mangoes.

(Praveen Kumar Jha is a Norway based author, columnist and doctor. He can be reached at doctorjha@gmail.com)