On mangoes, the Mughals and climate change
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Besides my academic profession, I have been engaged in growing a mango garden in my native district of Rajanpur in southern Punjab, for well over three-and-a-half decades. It is one of the passions I have evolved with from childhood, when I used to fancy a mango garden laden with fruit, and me sitting under the dense shadow of a tree during the summer with icy cold water in the bucket full of ripe mangoes.
Dreams can come true with some effort and a lot of good luck. However, growing a mango garden is not an easy job, and certainly not for those who think of quick rewards. Every farmer will tell you a story of hard times, setbacks, slow progress, and meager income.
As we celebrate the mango season and enjoy the aroma, sweetness, and amazingly different flavors of hundreds of varieties, we should think of the multiple challenges farmers face due to climate change, water shortages, and unfavorable market practices that have stressed out many of the mango growers that I have been interacting with. It is primarily because of private efforts —individual passion and love for mango growing — that over four hundred varieties are grown in different parts of the country, mainly in Sindh and Southern Punjab.
The modern commercial mango growing has strong roots in Pakistan’s traditional culture in which mango trees were fabled as bearing the ‘king of the fruits’, the best in the world. Before planned gardens were established after the development of canal irrigation, people would have a few mango trees around wells and in the front yard of their houses, both for shade during the sweltering summer heat and for the expectation of fruit around the onset of the monsoon season.
Pakistan is the 6th largest producer of mangoes but exports only around 160,000 metric tons, merely fetching $150 million. There are a range of issues from poor management of gardens and low-tech harvesting to cleaning, packing, storing, and marketing internationally that count for low revenues. With relatively poor earnings compared to other crops, mango farmers are unable to make either capital investments in pest control or procure new technologies of harvesting and storing that reduce the quantity of export.
Rasul Bakhsh Rais
The tradition of growing mangoes flourished during the Mughal rule (1526-1857), as mango gardening became the culture of the upper classes. The king and nobility took a lot of pride in the size of the gardens and special varieties of mangoes, which they collected from different parts of the subcontinent. They hired the best-known gardeners who practiced the art of grafting favored varieties on plants grown from the seeds. Even today, the seed-grown and grafted ones exist side by side, but the grafted ones dominate the commercial market, and over time have changed the tastes of the public. The traditional enthusiast of mangoes, however, prefers tukhmis (seed-grown) over the qalmis (grafted) for their thready flesh, tangy flavor, and individual taste. The traditional farmers keep quite a few trees of their favorite tukhmis as gifts for close friends.
The mango growers of all sizes continue to maintain the tradition of giving away crates of mangoes as gifts to friends, depending on the size of one’s social circle. Pakistan’s political aristocracy and state functionaries, very much like the Mughal nobility, send and receive mangoes that are quite anticipated around this time.
It may sound a bit parochial, but I dare to say this, Pakistani mangoes are the best in juicy flesh, colors, fragrance, and taste. The Indians across the border grow some of the same varieties, like Anwar Ratol, Langra, Chaunsa, and Alfonso, and these are as good as Pakistan’s, but there is no comparison for the Sindhri, Sufaid Chaunsa, and late variety of Anwar Ratol of Pakistan. We are growing some of the Latin American varieties, like Sensation (Keitt), which has beautiful colors and ripens in September and has a much longer shelf-life, but consumers like much sweeter and familiar varieties. On average, any medium size farmer may have close to twenty different kinds of mangoes, but his choices are driven by the market, which is dominated by a few branded names —Chaunsa, Langra, Dusserhi, and Sindhri.
Pakistan is the 6th largest producer of mangoes but exports only around 160,000 metric tons, merely fetching $150 million. There are a range of issues from poor management of gardens and low-tech harvesting to cleaning, packing, storing, and marketing internationally that count for low revenues. With relatively poor earnings compared to other crops, mango farmers are unable to make either capital investments in pest control or procure new technologies of harvesting and storing that reduce the quantity of export.
In recent years, they have faced the impact of climate change with untimely rains at the time of flowering in late February, and floods and strong winds in the months of May causing massive drops in fruit before maturing.
We may see mango production becoming stressed, acreage under cultivation shrinking if the problems of climate change, the hold of middlemen on the market, and poor research inputs are not addressed. The fear is economic forces may negatively affect the long tradition of mango farming, and the deep culture associated with it, for the next generations. In the materialistic world, economics is likely to trump the passion for mangoes if it is less profitable or climatically unsustainable.
- Rasul Bakhsh Rais is Professor of Political Science in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS, Lahore. His latest book is “Islam, Ethnicity and Power Politics: Constructing Pakistan’s National Identity” (Oxford University Press, 2017).
