Khusro is an important entry in the history of music and language of India. He is a link between older musical forms and newer ones like the khayal, ghazal, qawwali, and tarana. He is also said to have adapted older instruments into newer forms like sitar and tabla, though we do not know the exact details. There is evidence, however, that he loved the mango; he called it naghz tareen mewa-e-hindustan, the most supreme fruit of Hindustan. He especially liked the fact that, unlike other fruits, the mango was edible even when it was not ripe. He wrote sixteen riddles in a poetic form called Keh-Mukarni (meaning: say it, then deny it). In one verse, a woman asks another about something that appears year after year, is juicy to the lips, and for which she is willing to pay a price. When the other asks if she is talking about her lover, she denies it and then clarifies that it is the mango.
It is easy to find the mango mentioned in the lyrics or bandish used in ragas of Indian classical music. For a rendition of Raga Bahar, a springtime raga, the classical singer Kumar Gandharva composed a bandish titled ‘Aiso Kaiso Aayo Rita Re’. It questions Vasanta about its tepid arrival, about the mango trees not flowering, about the bumble-bee not buzzing about. It then pleads the case of the pained koel or the cuckoo bird and the colourless flowers.
The koel is innately linked to the mango in songs, not the least because the bird’s mating call is plaintive and piercing. It gets louder as mating season approaches in the summer, giving a sonic effect to the mango grove. The connection just keeps giving. Innumerable lyrics have riffed off koels and mango trees. Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan sang Raga Malkauns to the bandish ‘Koyaliya Bole Ambuva’. Begum Akhtar sang a Dadra composition to the bandish ‘Koyaliya Mat Kar Pukar’. The bird is usually described in the feminine. As your neighbourhood bird watcher might tell you, it is actually the male who lets out that mating call to attract the female. It does so when it notices crows nesting, because koels are aggressive brood parasites. The koel is smart enough to deceive the crow, itself the smartest of birds.
Like the Antakshari, the Chahar-beit is a competitive lyrical form, performed as overnight Beit-Bazi. Its meter is from Arabic poetry but it came to India from Afghanistan via soldiers who used it to stay awake during campaigns. In peaceful times, Beit-Bazi shifted to mango orchards where Afghan musclemen were first employed as guards to protect the produce of prized trees. Later, they turned into gardeners and graftsmen. Unlike other lyrical forms, though, Chahar-Beit never got gentrified or reinvented into pop culture and is hardly known today.
It is in the well-recognized forms, however, that poets have left the most memorable tributes to the mango. The Sanskrit poet Kalidasa is the gold standard of mango writing. In his play Shakuntala, he compares the protagonist’s fingers to the tender shoots of the mango. It is the flower, naturally, that really gets him going, preceding Tagore by centuries in celebrating Kamadeva’s arsenal. The play depicts the custom of young women plucking mango flowers to offer them as rearmament to Kamadeva; just that here, his name is Manmatha for how he churns the mind. (Lock and load! Take cover, men, for you have no idea what’s about to hit you!) Says Shakuntala in the play: ‘Oh, mango bud, I offer you / To Kama, grasping now his bow. / Be you his choicest dart, your mark / Some maid whose lover wanders far.’ A stately mango tree is a metaphor for a young and virile king, while the vines of jasmine entwining the tree become the female protagonist. Kalidasa made the mango blossom-spring-Kamadeva corollary his own. Innumerable mango articles get their jump-start from his verses.
The modern name bearing down upon mango writing is the nineteenth-century Delhi poet Mirza Asadullah Beg Khan ‘Ghalib’. He was fixated on the fruit, however, not the flowers! He wrote an entire masnavi, an extensive poetic form derived from Persia, dedicated to the mango fruit; it is titled ‘Dar-Sifat-e-Amba’, or In the Praise of the Mango. In it, he calls the fruit sweeter than sugar from cane. The mango was the simplest of pleasures for this poet of riveting complexity. In perhaps the most famous modern couplet on the mango, he speculates on the fall of Adam from Eden after consuming the forbidden fruit of knowledge, which in Islamic canon is gandum or wheat. Ghalib questions Adam’s choice of fruit:
Firdaus mein gandum ke evaz aam jo khate
Aadam kabhi jannat se nikaale nahi jate
Three incidents of Ghalib’s fascination with mangoes are repeated in many articles on the mango every season. All three come from the 1897 book Yadgar-e-Ghalib by Altaf Husain Hali, his student and disciple. One has a friend ribbing Ghalib when a donkey refuses to eat mango remains in the lane outside his house; only donkeys don’t like mangoes, the poet replies. In the second, Ghalib is out inspecting a royal orchard in the company of the king Bahadur Shah Zafar. The king asks the poet why he was scrutinizing the fruits so closely. It is said, replied Ghalib, that each fruit has its consumer’s name on it, so he was looking for his name. The king responds soon after by sending over a basket of choice fruit. The third anecdote is about a discussion among learned people on the most desirable qualities of mangoes. When it gets too intricate, Ghalib cuts it short; he says only two things are necessary in mangoes: they should be sweet and plentiful. Ghalib’s letters are infused with his desire for the fruit and more than thirty-five varieties can be counted there.
One hears mango-related anecdotes of famous poets. Most are unverified and many are apocryphal, but even those ones tell a bigger story. After tasting a mango brought from his village in Unnao, Uttar Pradesh, the poet Suryakant Tripathi (1897–1961), known by his nom-de-plume ‘Nirala’, is said to have identified the tree on which it had grown. The Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911–1984) is said to have declared that only mangoes and grapes were entitled to be called fruit, the rest were all vegetables. Akbar Allahabadi (1846–1921) once wrote a letter in verse to Munshi Nisar Husain of Lucknow, asking him to send a consignment of mangoes.
Former journalist Himanshu Bajpai of Lucknow has gathered the poems and mango-related anecdotes of several Urdu poets, turning them into a live storytelling performance in the traditional Dastangoi form, revived in recent years after being forgotten. Bajpai gets several invitations to perform his Dastan-e-Aam during the mango season. He takes his time over Shabbir Hasan Khan or Josh Malihabadi (1898–1982), born in the land of orchards. In his later years, the poet moved to Pakistan and died there. His letters were full of nostalgia for the orchards of his village. He regretted that he was not going to be buried in Malihabad.
In the rural setting of Munshi Premchand’s novel Godaan (1936, The Gift of a Cow), the mango appears repeatedly. It is there in the first chapter as the summer Sun rises from behind a mango grove. It is there in the last chapter; as the protagonist dies, his wife feeds him aam panna made of raw mangoes. Elsewhere is a description of raw mangoes in daal. Ripening mangoes become a metaphor for the youthfulness of his daughters. A discussion on philosophy and discrimination compares the mango’s fruitfulness with thorny acacias and out-of-reach palms. The onset of the month of Phalgun at the beginning of a chapter is marked by mango flowering.
The most evocative prose on mango flowering I have found is an essay by Hazari Prasad Dwivedi (1907–1979), a giant of Hindi literature. Titled ‘Aam Phir Baura Gaye’ (Mango Trees Flower Again), it opens with a tale he had heard in his childhood: if a mango tree flowers before Vasanta Panchami, then one should take its flowers and rub them on the palm of the hand; this turns the hand into an antidote to scorpion stings… but only for a year.
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Dwivedi concludes by saying that the mango flower is a gift of providence but the fruit is a result of human ingenuity.
Modern science agrees. The high-quality mango fruit is a result of generations of selection and breeding by humans. Yet, it is the flower that produces the fruit. Long before the setting up of market infrastructure in the late twentieth century, when people consumed only the mangoes grown in their region, a large part of India went mad with Madana’s arrows to celebrate spring.
Excerpted with permission from Aleph Book Company