Mango mania grips India every year starting in some parts of the country in March and lasting till August. People go crazy waiting for their preferred variety or even booking it in advance. Sopan Joshi, the author of this rich and well researched biography opens his book by talking about his uncle in Indore whose best welcome for his nephews from Delhi was serving loads of mango pulp preparation called aam ras! The word for mango flower in Hindi is ‘Baur’, once the flower arrives on the tree people go mad which in Hindi is said to be ‘Bauraana’ (another word for going crazy); he quotes many stories both true and apocryphal to make his point. The narrative arc of this 400-page book is vast ranging from social, cultural, economic, scientific, historic, even pre-historic (the author has seen fossils of mango leaves that pre-date human evolution by millions of years). He finds Southeast Asia to be the place of origin of mango and even hints at the ‘litchi’ fruit being one of its ancestors.

India’s Favourite Fruit: History, Origin, and the Relevance of Mango in Contemporary Culture
Sohail Akbar
MANGIFERA INDICA: A BIOGRAPHY OF THE MANGO by By Sopan Joshi Aleph Book Company, 2024, 432 pp., INR 799.00
October 2024, volume 48, No 10