Shin Chilti is known for its peculiar colour while Angur lata is small and resembles a grape with sweet and sour taste. Darpan Mago discovers facts and anecdotes about the varieties of mango at an ongoing fest
Once Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, the sixth President of Pakistan had sent the former Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi, a basket full of ‘special mangoes’ from his state. Gandhi, who thoroughly relished the delicious fruit, wrote to the President thanking him and appreciating the specially handpicked variety that was only available in Pakistan. This letter was published in prominent publications several years back but drew displeasure of one man. Javid Faridi met Gandhi and explained how the variety was born in India and not in Pak.
“He explained that during Partition his brother took a few mango plants from their garden and settled in Pakistan. He named this variety Anwar Rataul and this later became popular due to its utter sweetness. It was then the PM realised that the variety she had just relished belonged to her own country. Now, the same variety is sold as Rataul in India and Anwar Rataul in Pakistan. It is one of the sweetest mangoes you will ever have,” informs Tariq Mustafa, the owner of Mustafa Orchard in Muzaffarnagar as he meets us at the ongoing mango festival at Dilli Haat in Pitampura. Several such tales and anecdotes just float in air about the king of fruits here.
As they say, summer without the mouthwatering taste of mangoes, seems incomplete. Many different varieties of mangoes like that of Rataul are presented at this three-day long fest. The festival that has been happening from the past 26 years has become a major cultural event of Delhi and attracts thousands of visitors from all over the country. Mango cultivators from states like Bihar, Haryana, Uttrakhand and Uttar Pradesh had gathered to display the traditional and hybrid varieties of the fruit. Each stall at the spacious halls of Dilli Haat proudly hosts numerous types of mangoes, right from shapes and weight to varying sweetness. “There is a proper method devised to measure the sweetness of mangoes. The mango variety is generally produced through cross-breeding techniques. For instance, Indians prefer extremely sweet mangoes, where as the westerners have a liking for the lesser sweet ones. To prepare fruits catering diverse tastes and purposes, Ambika, a new variety was developed in the year 1999. It is an offspring of Amrapali and Janardhan Pasand varieties of the fruit. With a lesser sweetness of about 19-20 TSS (Total Soluble Solids), Ambika was made for export purposes. It carries a thick peal and doesn’t perish while shipping to different countries in the west,” says Ram Kumar of Central Institute for Sub-Tropical Horticulture in lucknow. Interestingly, the former chief minister of Delhi, Sheila Dixit also has a mango variety named after her. “I was impressed by the minister’s obsession about mangoes. We have many different mango trees in our garden and their fruits have not yet been given any names. There is a 60-70 year old mango tree and we addressed its fruit with general descriptive names. It was recently that I decided to name the fruit Sheela mango and coin a new variety,” says Tariq.
Mangoes are seasonal and the most popular varieties we usually find in markets are only available in the summer season. The tree flowers in winters and approaching summer time is appropriate for harvesting the fruit. Not many know that extensive research in the field of mango cultivation has produced hybrid varieties that are readily available all around the year. “There is a special umbrella variety that lies in our centre at Saharanpur. We have an exclusive range of mango trees that flower four times a year and guarantee fruit at least three times in the same year. Mango is known as king of fruits for its taste, nutrients and uniqueness in availability patterns. It was then thought to make a variety that would bear fruit more than once and fulfill the ever growing demand. This category was named Bahrahmasi and has four varieties in it. These are Sadhaphal, Bealdhar Khurd, Masho and Zimnistani. Out of the four, the sweetest one is Sadhaphal. Now that Bahrahmasi turned out to be an unpopular choice in commercial terms, the fruit is grown and kept for research purposes. One can come to our centre and seek information on research and also obtain the plants,” says Suresh Kumar, deputy director at Horticultural Experiment and Training Centre in Saharanpur. The most popular variety of mangoes includes Dussehri, langra, Chausa, Rataul, Alphonso and Amrapali. There are more than 1,365 varieties of mangoes in the world and about 1,000 of them are available in India. “Dussehri, the most popular variety of the fruit, comes from India. The variety is named after a village Dussehri in Kakori near Malihabad in Uttar Pradesh. The tree which first produced this variety is still alive and bears fruits. Now, people from even the most far flung places come to see the legendary growth,” informs Jitendra Sharma, a horticulture inspector at Horticulture Experiment and Training Centre in Malihabad.
Mango has found its place in the oldest of Indian literature. Some of the versions of Ramayana blame Mangoes for the destruction of Raavan’s spellbinding garden by Hanuman. RP Srivastav, who was the director of Central Institute for Sub-Tropical Horticulture, has been the pivotal consultant from the past ten years to conduct the mango festival in Delhi. He tells us, “Mangoes had originated first in Southeast Asia thousands of years ago and then gradually spread throughout the world. The fruit is believed to be indigenous to the Indian sub continent and is as old as the land itself. Delhi is currently the only state that houses such a grand festival only dedicated to mangoes. It has been doing this from the last 26 years now. About 700 varieties of mangoes are spread across three big halls of Dilli Haat. We have mangoes in different shapes and sizes, ranging from the smallest resembling like grapes, to the biggest and the bulkiest of all. Here, we conduct a series of competitions in different domains like variety, quality, shapes and weight. This time, the heaviest of all mangoes weighs 1.5 kgs and is brought by Sahib of Sitapur district. The second prize in the weight category went to a mango of 1.4 kgs belonging to Mohommad Hanif, who too hails from Sitapur.”
Other peculiar types of mangoes like Angur lata, Shin Chitli and Kubra were also there at the stalls. Shin Chilti is known for its peculiar colour, while Angur lata is small and resembles a grape fruit with sweet and sour taste. As the name says, the Kubra variety of mango has a heterogeneous and non-regular shape.
photos Pankaj Kumar