The mango is a unique mirror. The more we talk about it, the more we reveal our ignorance. The Indian compulsion to discuss the mango plays out over and over—in drawing rooms, on social media, in column inches, on air time, in trains and buses and aircraft, wherever two or three are gathered. This wall-to-wall coverage moves along well-grooved ruts of hyperbolic excitement. Almost all of it is far removed from reality.
Take the oft-repeated mango export story, for example. There’s no doubt India grows the world’s best mangoes, by a distance. Yet this superior product struggles to get into the export markets where customers willingly pay a premium for the best produce. This upsets non-resident Indians (NRIs), who see the shelves of US shopping chains stocked with below-average mangoes of Latin American extraction. For upwardly mobile NRIs, it diminishes India’s standing—and soft power, that new cultural mantra. Since Indians love to talk about mangoes, the lack of exports becomes an annual summertime lament.
More seriously, for mango growers seeking profitability, it’s an insurmountable obstacle. They constantly fail to meet the quality control measures required to access the high-end markets of rich countries. (About a third of Indian mango exports go to only the United Arab Emirates for the South Asian consumers there.)
Indian mango exporters have their consignments get rejected all the time. Rich countries bump up their export restrictions every now and then. In May, Japan suspended mango imports from India after its inspectors were disappointed with the poor phytosanitary standards at a vapour heat treatment plant in Uttar Pradesh.
In 2014, the European Union (EU) stopped mango exports from India after its inspectors were appalled by the standards at a Mumbai export processing facility; the ban was lifted in 2015.
For many years, Indian mangoes were not allowed in the US; while the ban was lifted after a 2007 trade deal, the procedure to export to the US is prohibitive for most exporters. In trade parlance, such restrictions are called non-tariff barriers (NTB). They can come from either a genuine concern for food safety and insect pests, or they can be a form of trade retaliation aimed at protecting domestic markets.
FOOD SCUFFLES
In June, quarantine inspectors in Nepal detected excessive pesticide residues in import consignments of Indian mangoes. It imposed new phytosanitary rules, effectively restricting mango imports. India’s ministry of agriculture issued a press release, quoting Nepalese authorities, to say this was no “ban”. Then came reports of mango shortages in Nepal, and that local producers were doing well. Then, India imposed new safety norms on the import of Nepalese tea, leading to a temporary shutdown of tea factories in Nepal.
The India-Nepal NTB scuffle over the mango was deeply ironic. It was a Nepalese agriculture scientist, Bhuwon Ratna Sthapit (1954-2017), who did more than anybody else for the conservation of heirloom mangoes across India. Sthapit had a deep appreciation of the traditional knowledge of ordinary farmers of the Global South. Over a distinguished career, he worked tirelessly to promote South-South cooperation. He made his name after identifying the outstanding paddy varieties that survived high altitude and cold conditions; ordinary farmers had bred and conserved these varieties in Pokhara, the district where Sthapit was born. He went on to acquire international fame as a rice breeder.
How did a paddy scientist from Nepal get into Indian mangoes? Because in 2013, while working at Bioversity International, a research and development organisation for agricultural biodiversity across the world, Sthapit created and led a unique multilateral programme. (Along with the Indian Council for Agricultural Research, ICAR, and a host of related agencies, it drew funding from the Global Environment Facility and the UN Environment Programme.) Across South and South-East Asia, the programme identified and celebrated farmers and growers who had protected traditional fruit varieties, providing in situ conservation. Such cultivars are invaluable for biodiversity and plant genetics, although they are not valued in the market. This programme went on to create a network of farmers conserving traditional mangoes across India. The project Sthapit created bears upon the most outstanding facet of Indian mangoes: the wealth of varieties.
MANGO FICTION
It’s often said that India has about one thousand mango varieties. Yet only 24 varieties command a presence in the market (see box). Most people struggle to name more than five. In truth, it is impossible to get an accurate number. The reason lies in biology’s lustreless stepchild: botany. Being human, we fall with zoology. Our life, though, is impossible without plants. But you will find very little in the media about plants, or people who deal with them, like farmers and ecologists and botanists, perhaps India’s most culturally invisible demographic.
Botanical information is restricted to the origins of mango varieties. Take northern India’s three most popular mango varieties: Dashehri, Langda and Chausa. Dashehri is the name of a village in the Kakori block of Lucknow district. The tree from which this variety comes still stands in the village, more than 150 years old. Shoots from this tree have been grafted on top of saplings to create a variety that is true to type. (Because a tree from its seed will not produce the exact same fruit.) Dashehri is a rare example of a variety that can be traced to a specific tree. The Rataul mango is like that; it can be traced to one tree in Rataul village of Baghpat district in western Uttar Pradesh. That tree, however, died a few years ago, after all pleas to save it fell on deaf ears.
The origin of Langda is not known. Numerous stories are offered. There’s one about a lame saint in Varanasi who had a mango tree near his hut; the mango variety therefrom got its name as a transferred epithet. If you go east of Varanasi, Langda is called Kapooriya in parts of north Bihar; the name is used for other varieties in other places. In south Bihar, Langda is called Malda. If you go further east to the district of Malda in West Bengal, the same variety is called Laingda. If you go by genetic analysis, the mango’s greatest diversity is in eastern India. But that doesn’t explain Chausa.
From research papers to all manner of stories, that variety originated in the village of Chausa, on the south bank of the Ganga; a small river called Karamnasha joins the Ganga here, separating Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. This was the site of the battle between Sher Shah Suri and Humayun on 26 June 1539. The lore has it that Sher Shah named the variety himself to celebrate his victory. There’s not a shred of evidence for any of this. It marks an Indian habit of linking everything with the mango, because of its unique importance.
It’s no surprise that the villages in and around Chausa don’t grow this variety and haven’t heard of it either. To them, Chausa means seedling mangoes that are sucked; in Hindi, sucking is choosna. The variety seems to have originated from a village called Victoriya Ganj, 90km north-east of Lucknow. Formerly called Chausa, the village has no mango orchards now. But the story about Sher Shah naming the variety keeps getting published. Because when it comes to mangoes in India, fiction trumps non-fiction.
The single most important fact about mango varieties is that they were all “found” in nature; they were promoted after being identified for their desirable traits. (Only three of the 24 commercial varieties were created in research fields by scientists; none of the tens of varieties released by ICAR over the past six decades is as popular as Langda or Alphonso or Himsagar.) How did these “foundlings” come about? There is little historical record of that. It’s safe to assume that they resulted from an unknown number of selections made by people who conserved the trees with the desirable traits. If fruit was not desirable, the tree was still useful for timber or for providing shade.
Some of those selections might have been made by expert gardeners working in the orchards and pleasure gardens of powerful rulers and rich traders. But a bulk of these selections were made by ordinary people over generations—and in mango groves called amrai, grown from seeds on common lands, not in privately owned orchards. These mango groves were the first step away from wild mangoes, towards intensive cultivation and selection. Most villages and cities had such amrais till they began to be cut down by the zamindars the British appointed under the Permanent Settlement of 1793. Today, mango groves exist only in tribal areas. Those groves are treasures from where future varieties can come, either through cross-pollination or through newer tools coming from mapping the mango genome. Either way, new things can come only from the old, from repositories of biodiversity.
Bhuwon Sthapit knew that. His training in agricultural sciences did not sever his cultural connection with his people and their traditions. In designing his project, Sthapit was thinking of the future. He wished to celebrate farmers continuing to play the basic selection game that created prized mango varieties in the first place.
WASTING ORCHARDS
What of those who maintain commercial orchards? That story is so bleak nobody touches it. India is incapable of producing and processing mangoes that meet the highest international standards, with very few exceptions. The methods of production and processing are shoddy beyond hope. Our mango orchards are, overwhelmingly, a picture of neglect. It is very difficult to find an owner who takes an interest. That’s a legacy handicap.
Most mango orchards standing today were planted hurriedly in the 1950s and 1960s to protect family-owned land from being seized under the land ceiling laws, when zamindari was abolished. Now, for their children, the inherited land functions like a bank fixed deposit. They obtain a regular income by “selling the crop” in advance to a contractor. This does not require any paperwork. Most informal contracts are for two years because mango trees bear fruit properly once in two years; it’s called “alternate or biennial bearing”.
The contractor pays at least half the payment in advance, paying the other half after the harvest is sold. In many cases, the contractor pays the full amount upfront. For the landowner, this guarantees a secure income without ever getting their footwear dirty. An overwhelming majority of orchard owners are absentee landlords. They can’t be bothered. All the risk belongs to the contractor, who is always desperate, with no long-term interest in the health of the trees, the orchards or the mango business, which is seasonal, in any case—three months in a year. Contractors usually have other occupations and even hold regular jobs.
Orchards left unattended through the year are infested with insect-pests. To cut down losses, contractors spray synthetic pesticides rampantly; often, the chemicals are spurious. Overuse makes insect-pests resistant to pesticides, even as friendly insects die. It’s a recipe for unhealthy orchards. The fruit they produce either has insect-pests or high levels of pesticide residues. Both are grounds for rejection in the export market, particularly in the premium markets of rich countries.
Mango cultivation is a long-term investment. If you plant a tree today, it will begin to produce after 5-10 years. While the mango season lasts only three months, the orchards require round-the-year care. That takes not just labour and capital, but also horticultural knowledge—technical and specialised. And a passion for growing quality mangoes, not just telling fancy (and often fictional) stories on the mango.
The contractor cannot make the long-term investments and take the risks. The owners couldn’t care less. That impasse ails our mango sector as a whole, not just our exports. It cannot be fixed because the problem has not been studied or quantified. To address this, a national survey of mango orchards is the essential first step, including the history of land ownership. A second step can be a comprehensive review of economic and horticultural practices. That’s hard-headed work. It can’t be done by quoting Mirza Ghalib’s passion for mangoes, bless the poet.
Sopan Joshi is the author of Mangifera indica: A Biography of the Mango (2024).