https://scroll.in/magazine/837450/goan-mangoes-are-the-best-in-world-history-proves-so-too
Mango season is serious business in Goa. From the beginning of the
year, denizens of India’s smallest state start anxiously scanning
prized trees, especially those belonging to their neighbours. By
March, tell-tale blossoms broadly indicate what’s on the way, and the
wait begins in earnest. Anticipation sharpens with every degree the
temperature rises, right into the height of the summer.
Come April and both orchards and bazaars across the state spill over
with grim-faced men and women, each intent on ascertaining the full
picture of expected supply, sizes and prices. Families put their heads
together to carefully calculate the right time to enter the market, so
that they are assured of their fair share of the most desirable fruit.
By this time, the rest of India is giddy with rapture over the arrival
of Hapoos from the coastlines of Maharashtra and Gujarat. But in Goa,
the waiting game isn’t for that pale approximation of the original
Alphonso, which is left for tourists and similar ignorants. Here, it
is all about local produce.
Goa’s mangomania focuses collectively and laserlike on the Fernandin
and Xavier and Monserrate, and most especially, the indescribably
sublime Hilario and Mankurad.
It has been this way for centuries. The whole of Goa, from the Ghats
to the Arabian Sea, comprises a mere sliver of the vast Subcontinent,
but has developed more than 100 varieties of mangoes ever since the
Jesuits introduced modern grafting techniques in the 16th century.
Within just a couple of decades of that influx of European ideas, the
results of the experiments had become acclaimed, treasured and
celebrated wherever they reached across the known world.
The arrival of the annual mango tribute to the court in Lisbon soon
became a celebration that brought all other proceedings to standstill.
One main reason the hopelessly mango-obsessed Emperor Akbar encouraged
the presence of Jesuits from Goa in his court for so many years was
their expertise in fruiticulture – eventually he planted an orchard of
100,000 grafts in Darbangha. His equally mango-besotted son Shah Jehan
spent state resources to carve out a special “fast track” route from
the Konkan to Delhi, to ensure rapid supply of the fruit through the
summer months.
Although no fruit has as many powerful associations with India –
mangoes are mentioned in the Ramayana, Mahabharata, as well as the
earliest Buddhist and Jain literature – historical records show that
it was arrival of the Portuguese in Goa in 1510 which catapulted the
mango to India’s indisputable king of fruits. Just a generation later,
in 1563, the Portuguese Renaissance Sephardic Jewish doctor (and
pharmacognosy pioneer) Garcia da Orta’s extraordinary Colóquios dos
simples e drogas da Indiacould assert that mangoes “surpass all the
fruits of Spain [meaning Europe].”
Less than a century later, in 1653, the Italian adventurer Niccolao
Manucci concurred: “The best mangoes grow in Goa. These are again
divided into varieties with special colour, scent and flavour. I have
eaten many that had the taste of peaches, plums, pears and apples of
Europe. However many you eat, with or without bread, you still desire
to eat more and they do you no harm.”
By 1727, everyone seemed to agree. The well-travelled Scottish sea
captain Alexander Hamilton voiced the consensus: “The Goa mango is
reckoned the largest and most delicious to the taste of any in the
world, and the wholesomest and best tasted of any fruit in the world.”
As a result, Goa mangoes were established as an essential tool of
Portuguese diplomacy. Crates of Alphonso mangoes were prized tribute
in all the kingdoms of the Deccan, and especially in the Maratha
court. In 1792, the Portuguese ambassador to Pune, Vithalrao
Valaulikar, wrote to the Governor of Goa, advising strict restriction
on mango imports to all the territories which are now Maharashtra, in
order to ensure that the Estado da India Portuguesa’s treasury of Goan
fruit remained rare and precious, thus retaining its fabled allure.
Not much later, the Peshwas developed mango ambitions of their own,
and embarked on planting millions of Goa-derived Alphonso mango grafts
throughout the Konkan. It is the hardy, hybrid descendants of these
fruits which now flood India and the rest of the world as Hapoos.
The lasting success and popularity of the Hapoos has many interesting
contemporary twists. In 2007, the US finally opened its doors to
exports from Maharashtra’s Ratnagiri district, in direct exchange for
India allowing in Harley Davidson motorbikes. Periodic rounds of mango
diplomacy have seen baskets of Maharashtra’s best sent across to
Pakistan to sweeten negotiations across the bargaining table.
But even as they are prized everywhere else, these undoubtedly decent
and adequately tasty fruits are not pursued with any enthusiasm in
Goa. That’s because of the far more exquisite varietals which
