This consignment of mangoes contains some of the most delicate and coveted varieties of the summer fruit and the prices are significantly higher in comparison to the more regular varieties commonly found across India. Categorised by many under the generic umbrella of ‘Murshidabad mangoes’, today, there are a little over 100 varieties of mangoes that can be found in this district.
Over the years, Murshidabad’s small Sheherwali community and its diaspora have laid unofficial claim over the district’s unique mangoes, in part because it was incorporated into their summer cuisine and has begun to be associated with them, particularly over the past decade following community efforts to share its heritage and culture.
Of the 100-odd varieties, the Kohitoor is the most famed and coveted. It is also one of the most expensive; depending on the size, each mango can cost anywhere between Rs 800 to Rs 900 and is available for a very short window of a few days only, from when it is plucked to when it reaches a customer.
“The Kohitoor is very delicate. The other mangoes can be stored as you keep any other fruit, but not this one,” says Dr Samarendra Nath Khanra, Deputy Director of Horticulture, West Bengal. Each Kohitoor has to be constantly turned on its side at regular intervals to ensure that the entire mango is uniform and no one side over-ripens, loses its shape or develops pressure marks after it is left lying on one single side.
Murshidabad’s mango history
The earliest mentions of the mangoes of West Bengal in the Malda belt can be traced to the Pala dynasty that ruled modern-day Bengal and Bihar from the 8th to the 12th century and can also be found in the writings of the Chinese traveller Hsüen Tsang who travelled across the subcontinent between 629 and 645 AD. During Mughal rule, particularly under the reign of Humayun and Akbar, mango cultivation in the Bengal-Bihar region further flourished.
There is documented evidence of how mango cultivation found patronage under the rule of Murshid Quli Khan, who served as the first Nawab of Bengal from 1717 to 1727. British archival records show that under Nawab Murshid Quli Khan’s rule, armed guards would secure his mango orchards in Murshidabad district. Mangoes were an important part of the kitchens of the Nawabs of Bengal.
“The Nawabs had a lot of manpower and dedicated people who looked after the gardens and the mangoes. They had an ‘ambakhana’, a special room to store the mangoes in their properties,” says Khanra. Mangoes are climacteric fruits and they have to be harvested and stored during the time its sucrose develops, says Khanra.
The Kohitoor, the most coveted of the Murshidabad varieties, is so delicate that it has to be harvested using gloves and each mango has to be plucked using special nets to prevent damage to the fruit. So much so that the Nawabs of Bengal had a special process for cutting and eating the Kohitoor. “They would dip it in ice water. They would also use knives made of ivory to cut the fruit because any other would leave visible marks on its delicate flesh. So people who couldn’t afford ivory would use bamboo knives or cut into the mango using their teeth. But this process is limited to the Kohitoor only,” says Khanra.
At a community meeting this week in Kolkata where mangoes from Murshidabad were cut and consumed by the Sherwalis, indianexpress.com observed a Kohitoor being cut using a special knife made of treated iron, with the knife dipped in water and wiped before each peel of the mango was stripped away, to make sure no marks are formed. “This knife is not made any more. It was earlier made in Jiaganj. These days, we have to use regular knives to cut the mangoes,” Sunil Dugar, a member of the Sheherwali community in Kolkata, says.
A Murshidabadi heritage
“The Kohitoor is stored on cotton. The top part of the mango is eaten and the bottom is made into juice because finger marks form on it when you hold the fruit. The bottom part of the Kohitoor is then used to make mango juice. The juice of this fruit is very thin and the best among all mango varieties,” says Dugar.
Dugar says his family still stores the mangoes in the same way as it was done in the past. “My great-grandfather would not touch mangoes that had finger marks on them. The mango would change taste if it had finger marks, he would say,” he adds.
Members of the Sheherwali community, particularly those who grew up in Murshidabad, have family stories of the district’s famed mangoes, especially the Kohitoor. The fruit is not only consumed in its original form, but it has also made its way into the community’s cuisine in the form of aam ras, kheer, curries etc. One of the reasons why the mangoes of Murshidabad became so closely associated with the Sheherwali community’s cuisine was because of their socio-economic prosperity and their proximity to the Nawabs of Bengal.
In the early 18th century, when a group of wealthy Oswal Jain merchants from Rajasthan first migrated to Bengal in search of economic prospects, they settled in and around the towns of Azimganj and Jiaganj in modern-day Murshidabad district, which was then the capital of the Nawabs of Bengal. The community that came to be known as the Sheherwali Jains were influential in business and rapidly grew as bankers and financiers during colonial rule in the Indian subcontinent.
Their access to the Nawabs of Bengal meant that several lifestyle and culinary habits also seeped into the community’s food; in this case, the mangoes of Murshidabad and how the Kohitoor had to be stored and cut.
Climate change and other factors
For over 26 years, Sannu Sheikh, a farmer in Murshidabad’s Hazarduari town, has been in the business of growing and selling mangoes and is well-informed about all varieties grown in the district. “There were no Kohitoor mangoes this year. I just managed to procure 100-150 pieces and they got sold,” says Sheikh.
The low harvest of the Kohitoor this year has been a common complaint among the Sheherwali community, as well as scientists and farmers.
“Climate change is affecting these mangoes. High temperatures like 40-45 degrees Centigrade have resulted in smaller sizes of mangoes. They would earlier be around 250 gm but now they are half of that. Fruit dropping is also increasing. In high temperatures and low rainfall, the tree naturally drops mangoes onto the ground before it matures to survive. So if approximately 250 Kohitoor grow, 100 will drop,” says Khanra.
The change in rain patterns has also impacted the mangoes. “Earlier in June, July and August, we would see rains but the rains have reduced in these months. Now it rains in October. The crop diversity has also changed. Now, a lot of new varieties of mangoes are coming, which fruit all year round due to changing agriculture practices, and climate change is also affecting the fruit,” adds Khanra.
Farmers and scientists agree that one major reason why the crop of the Kohitoor has been impacted is the reduced number of trees. “The Murshidabad mangoes are not commercially available because the trees have reduced,” says Dr Bikash Ghosh, former professor of Fruit Science at the Bidhan Chandra Krishi Viswavidyalaya. “The Ranipasand can be found but the other varieties are hard to find because fewer trees can be found. I am in Krishnanagar and we don’t get Murshidabad mangoes here.”
“Kohitoor is like Ilish (Hilsa fish). The original Kohitoor is found in only 11 to 12 private orchards and many people try to pass off other similar-looking mangoes as Kohitoor,” says Sheikh.
The mangoes of Murshidabad have always been different from the other common commercial varieties, sources said. “The Nawabs did not cultivate these mangoes for profit. They did it for their personal consumption. These varieties are not commercially viable because of the intense labour that goes into them, which is why we don’t see them in markets. These mangoes are consumed locally even today. Their commercial value and quantity is less but they are delicious,” says Khanra.
The diversity of mangoes in Murshidabad was a result of the intense love that the Nawabs had for the fruit. “The Nawabs introduced the grafting of mangoes. Also, just so that the others could not get these varieties, they would insert a needle into the growing mangoes and ruin the seed to make it infertile. When the mangoes would go to the Cossimbazar market for sale, they would be infertile and nobody else would be able to grow them,” says Khanra.
This is how the Nawabs of Murshidabad kept a monopoly over the cultivation of mangoes.
In his book, The Musnud of Murshidabad (1704-1904), Purna Chandra Majumdar, an Indian lawyer and scholar who served as a legal advisor and private secretary to the Nawab of Murshidabad, has extensively documented the importance of mangoes for the Nawabs of Bengal.
“Mobarak Manzil, like many gardens of the Nawab Bahadur of Murshidabad, produces very superior mangoes, for the variety and excellence of which Murshidabad has always been famous. They are known and appreciated in Calcutta by the name Choonakhali mangoes. But the fruits of the best qualities seldom go out of Murshidabad,” writes Majumdar.
Majumdar’s writings provide fascinating insights into the mangoes of Murshidabad and the love that the Nawabs harboured for them.
“Great precautions are taken to prevent the fruits from being purloined. The owners of the best gardens seldom sell them and hence the extreme difficulty of securing the best varieties in the bazaar. The Murshidabad fruit is unrivalled in colour, flavour and taste. Subacid mangoes are generally preferred by the Mahomedans to very sweet varieties, so much in flavour with the Hindus,” writes Majumdar.
In Murshidabad, during the rule of the Nawabs, mangoes were serious business. Majumdar has documented the complex process of harvesting these mangoes, which has not changed significantly over the years, because of how delicate the fruit are. “The fruits are taken down from the trees, one by one….No good mangoes are obtained by shaking the branches and collected on the ground. The slightest pressure or hurt spoils them. The parts affected become hard and bad of taste,” he writes.
“The Murshidabad varieties are considered rare. But this is because the trees are not there anymore. The varieties of the fruit that are well-loved are planted in bigger numbers,” says Ghosh. The reduction in trees is also because of the number of reducing orchards where these varieties are found.
“The trees of these mangoes in the orchards have been cut down and the land has been converted into plots for modern buildings. This is why the fruits are also fewer as the years go by,” says Sheikh.
Today, out of the 26 varieties which Majumdar listed in his book as the best varieties of Murshidabad mangoes, the Doodhia and Rougni are extinct, Khanra says.
These days, Dugar, like other members of the Sheherwali community, is reliant on cargoes of the delicate fruit sent to Kolkata, available for only approximately a week in the June-July period every year. “The weather changes have impacted the mangoes and the original trees that were planted 150-200 years ago have also gone. So the taste of the mangoes has changed. The mangoes are not taken care of the same way. I tell my family as well that they do not care for the mangoes the way they should be stored. When I was a child, in my home in Jiaganj-Azimganj, we had a hall dedicated to storing mangoes. Two people would take care of mangoes and monitor how they were ripening depending on the date on which they were plucked. The two people were responsible for constantly turning it. The Kohitoor had to be turned on its side six times a day,” says Dugar.
The taste that Dugar grew up with has changed. It would not be a stretch to say that mangoes of Murshidabad are a threatened species.