Trop Picks: Mango

Originally published Jun 23, 2015

Legend has it that in his last, anguished days, Paul Gauguin existed on a diet comprised solely of mangoes. To a dying man, these luscious, golden orbs must have offered a final taste of life's great pleasures.

But from the very beginning of his Tahitian encounter, Gauguin was as excited by the fruit as he was by the women--trying to capture the ripeness of both in painting after painting.

He wasn't the only one. Remember the dressmaker's promise in Bend It Like Beckham to turn Jesminder's "mosquito bites into juicy, juicy mangoes?"

As we're coming to the end of peak mango season, the Tropicalist thought it would be a good time to pay homage to the ill-fated chronicler of our indigenous bounty.

While Gauguin's Still Life with Teapot and Fruit featured Tahitian varietals, we looked closer to home, featuring Alphonso, Totapuri and Neelam mangoes from India, Sindhri mangoes from Pakistan, and Sein Ta Lone mangoes from Myanmar.

The genus Mangifera is believed to have originated somewhere in Malaysia or Indochina.

Malaysia is home to the maximum variety of Mangifera species. We're talking about wild mangoes here.

When it comes to the mangoes we eat, however, Mangifera indica, a species native to Myanmar and India, is the only name that counts.

It was the Portuguese who spread the seeds of M. indica throughout the Western hemisphere in the early sixteenth century. It was also the Portuguese who introduced grafting on mango trees to produce the best varietals like the Alphonso.

Within the Eastern hemisphere, it is thought that M. indica was introduced by Indian Buddhist monks making their first eastward journeys during the Buddhist Age (4th-5th centuries B.C.E.).

Interestingly, the naturalist Johann Reinhold Foster did not mention mangoes in his work on the fruits of the Pacific Islands at the time of James Cook's expedition (1772-1775). I imagine that the fruit must have been introduced subsequently. 

Sources:

S.K. Mukherjee, "Origin of Mango (Mangifera indica)" in Economic Botany, 1972.