Mango

The Tree in Vrindavan

In the thirtieth chapter of the Tenth Canto of the Bhagavatam the gopis, having lost Krishna in the midst of the rasa-lila, wander the forest and ask every living thing after Him: first the great trees, then the flowering ones, then the tulasi and the jasmine vines – and last of all the fruit trees on the bank of the Yamuna:

Chuta and Amra

One and the same tree is named here twice: chuta at the beginning of the verse and amra at the end. The commentators agree that both words are about the mango, but how the two differ they explain in three ways. Sridhara Swami speaks simply of two kinds of one tree. Srila Sanatana Gosvami, Vamshidhara Pandita and Narayana Bhatta Gosvami tell them apart by the taste of the fruit – sour and sweet. And Srila Jiva Gosvami, Srila Vishvanatha Chakravarti and Baladeva Vidyabhushana by their form: the chuta twines as a vine, the amra grows as a tree; Jiva Gosvami adds that the poets do not apply the word “vine” to the amra, and that in Madhyadesha, the middle country of India, chutas are indeed seen in the form of vines¹.

The mangoes of Vraja grow to a huge size. In the Vraja-riti-chintamani of Srila Vishvanatha Chakravarti Thakura a separate verse is given to their measure:

Spring, Cuckoos and the God of Love

The season of the mango in Vraja is spring. As soon as a warm wind blows, the buds swell at the tops of the trees, and the first to lose their heads are the cuckoos. Srila Jayadeva Gosvami in the Gita-Govinda pauses on that moment:

The Five Arrows of Kamadeva

The cuckoo and the mango bud are an inseparable pair of the poetry of spring. Further on in the same poem the heroine, seeing the flowering branches of the mango, pines in separation: the tips of those branches, says the commentary, have become rasala, “the very essence of rasa”. And in the Vrindavan of Srila Prabodhananda Sarasvati the spring does not end at all: there the drunken bumblebees hum over the mango shoots, the cuckoos sing without ceasing, and in the midst of that garden stands Krishna Himself².

The fragrant mango bud stands among the five flower arrows of Kamadeva as well. The Sanat-kumāra-saṁhitā, which Srila Vishvanatha Chakravarti Thakura quotes in his Mantrārtha-dīpikā, gives each letter of the kāma-bīja, the syllable klīṁ, its own flower: ka – the mango bud (āmra-mukula), la – the ashoka, i – the mallika, the crescent ardha-candra – the madhavi, the dot bindu – the bakula. There is another five as well, the lexical one: the Amara-koṣa names aravinda (lotus), ashoka, cūta (mango), navamallika and nilotpala (blue lotus)³. The lists do not quarrel: one counts flowers, the other reads a mantra.

Under the shade of a mango Srila Rupa Gosvami in the play Lalita-Madhava sets the scene as well where Krishna in the dusk takes a phantom form for the true Radha, standing at the very root of the tree⁴. And in the Stava-mala he prays that the mango tree of his own heart, sprinkled by the pastimes of Krishna in Gokula, may pour out a river of prema everywhere⁵.

Chaitanya Mahaprabhu

The very verse with which the gopis called out to the mango on the bank of the Yamuna, Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu repeated centuries later. In Jagannatha Puri the same separation would seize Him, and He addressed the trees and vines of the garden in those same words: “O chuta, O amra… show us the path by which Krishna has gone!”⁶

And in the conversation on the bank of the Godavari, Ramananda Raya made the mango an image of devotion itself:

The Fruit for Offering

The mango is offered to the Lord as well, and the Hari-bhakti-vilasa sets this fruit high: whoever offers a mango to Sri Hari gains the merit of a whole horse sacrifice⁷. Mangoes are put into the offering to Jagannatha too, and mango pickles of every kind – amra-kashandi, amsi, ama-khanda, tailamra – Raghava Pandita and his sister prepare year after year and send to Mahaprabhu in Puri.

There is another mango story in the Chaitanya-charitamrita, no longer about the fruit but about the one who offers it. Kalidasa brings mangoes to the house of Jhadu Thakura, a Vaishnava of the bhunimali caste. The host offers the fruits to Krishna in his mind and eats them with his wife, and Kalidasa afterwards secretly gathers up the discarded skins and stones: what he needs is not the mangoes but the remnants of a Vaishnava's meal.

Ayurveda

In the Ayurvedic compendia the mango (Mangifera indica) is a tree with a whole scattering of Sanskrit names: amra, sahakara, rasala. Its taste (rasa) is astringent, and in the ripe fruit sweet-sour; its potency (virya) cold, its quality light, its post-digestive effect (vipaka) pungent. The ripe fruit is held to be good for the heart, nourishing and pacifying to vata; the bark and the leaves with their astringent taste go against pitta and kapha; the unripe fruit kindles digestion, and the flowers and the stone are used for diarrhoea – already in the Madhavachikitsa (7th c.) the mango is named a remedy for atisara, diarrhoea.

Botany

The home of the mango is not the whole subcontinent, as one might think, but its north-eastern corner: botanists call Assam, the Eastern Himalayas, Myanmar and Thailand its native range, while across India itself the tree is counted as cultivated. Its crown is broad and dense; the leaves are alternate, crowded at the ends of the branches and hanging in narrow ribbons on thin stalks.

The mango flowers in a wave, from south to north: in December the south comes into flower, in January Bengal, in February eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, and only then, in February and March, the north, where Vraja stands too. The flowers are gathered into erect pyramidal panicles; most of them are male, and only the bisexual ones set fruit – that very mango drupe, the “king of fruits” of India.

In different regions the tree is called differently: am in Hindi, amba in Marathi, mamidi in Telugu, ma in Tamil. From there comes the European name of the fruit as well: the Tamil man-kay – man “the mango tree” and kay “fruit” – gave the Malay mangga and the Portuguese manga, and from the 1580s the English mango.