We’ve all grown up eagerly awaiting the monsoon season — not just for the joy of sipping chai and indulging in hot pakoras, but for the arrival of the undisputed king of fruits: the mango. For many of us, mangoes are wrapped in memory: grandmothers and mothers lovingly slicing them after a meal, their fragrance filling the air. Succulent, fresh, and impossibly tender, the mango has been a ritual, a nostalgia trip, a slice of summer on a plate. India’s love for mangoes goes far beyond summer indulgence — it’s a centuries-old obsession deeply embedded in the country’s culture, diplomacy, and history.
Every sun-charred summer, people scramble to buy them by the dozen, and visitors to India often leave with brimming crates, as souvenirs. Airports, during mango season, are dotted with cartons of the fruit, ready to cross borders — a happy consequence of modern-day globalization.
And yet, there is nothing new about globalization. If we jigsaw together fragments of Indian history, we would see that centuries before the first European ship crossed a storm-tossed ocean to India, the mango was already trotting across the globe. Born in the foothills of what is now Meghalaya, India’s beloved Mangifera indica had been cultivated for at least four thousand years before a Westerner ever tasted it. Sanskrit texts praised it. The Buddha is said to have meditated in a mango grove.
In fact, our first hint at the sweep of the rambling Indian trade and pilgrimage routes comes via Buddhism — it was ancient Buddhist monks, on pilgrimage to Indian Buddhist sites, who funneled the fruit into South East Asia, from where it trundled into China. By the tenth century, it had made its way to East Africa, through Persia.
The Maratha rulers, too, are said to have planted the tree everywhere they went, resulting in even further dissemination of the fruit. These were a few amongst the seeds of a fruity network that began in 1575, eventually arrowing into Agra in 1580, where Emperor Akbar, fascinated by a fruit unrivalled in color, smell, and taste grew his own mango orchards and even took to pouring milk and treacle at the base of the trees to enhance their taste.
It was the Columbian Exchange that finally sailed mango seeds across the ocean to Europe in the 15th century, and later to Brazil. In every place it arrived, the mango was adopted, transformed, and made local. In Mexico, it became the bedrock of the mangonada and of street snacks dusted with chili and lime. In the Caribbean, it fermented into rum punches and stewed into chutneys. From there, it was a hop, skip, and jump to North America.
Even the colonizing British, who tilted their sturdy noses up at many Indian fruits and vegetables, could not resist the mango. As early as 1883, they were shipping Christmas hampers of mango chutney, jam and jelly from Mumbai to family and friends in the UK.
In 1838, the fruit itself found itself an immigrant in London, thanks to the eccentric agriculturist Framji Cowasji Banaji who shipped a hermetically sealed basket of his choicest produce to the queen of England for a spot of diplomacy. It is not known in what state the mangoes reached England. What we do know is it would take until the early 1900s for the British in India to successfully send a large batch to the UK in good condition.
The globetrotting continued after India won its independence from the British. Back in 1955, Prime Minister Nehru sent a few mango saplings to China — a small gesture, but it said a lot. It wasn’t just about fruit; it was a way of saying, “Here’s something we love — and maybe you will too.”
Decades later, the mango in 2006, when US President George Bush visited New Delhi, Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh, offered mangoes to the US President, effectively ending a two-decade ban on the fruit in America.
In such a way, the mango crossed borders and bridges, linking a network of commerce whose threads stitch together millions as far away as Mexico and China, thus begging the question — how old really is globalization itself?
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