by RADHIKA OBEROI
The most frequent use of mangoes in fiction is as a succulent emblem of longings, yearnings and revelations, both physical and metaphysical PHOTO/Reuters
Summer in the Indian subcontinent is overripe with clichés. Milky clusters of champa blossom in the searing heat; koels, hidden from mankind behind the glossy leaves of jamun trees, are crazed with song; jamun trees, laden with purple fruit, buzz with bees making honey while rose-ringed parakeets make love on low-lying branches.
Among all these – the heat and dust of the city, the hullaballoo of birds and small animals, strange and sublime summer vacations – is one great enduring metaphor of the subcontinent’s summer: the mango. Too beloved an image to be discarded for being overused, the mango as a literary device in literature and poetry represents unspoken thoughts and feelings, unseen body parts of potential lovers, the summer’s transience, (and, as a corollary, the transience of youth and beauty), or even the quality of light on a particular day.
Hindu mythology bestows upon the mango flower a task that is vital for stirrings of a visceral nature. The god of love, Kamadeva, armed with flower-tipped arrows, uses the mango-blossom arrow as a weapon of mass amore, certain to turn women into love-tormented creatures, breathless with desire. Sanskrit literature is glutted with descriptions of mango blossoms being ecstatically pecked at by birds, or trembling in anticipation of secret trysts beneath their glorious shade.
Kalidasa, who lived either in the first century BC, during the reign of Vikramaditya, or in the fourth-fifth centuries AD during the reign of the Gupta Empire (the dates have never been determined conclusively), was peerless in his canonisation of the mango flower. In his Rtusamharam or The Gathering of the Seasons: A Poem in Six Cantos, Canto 6: Spring begins with this verse, translated into English by Chandra Rajan:
Sprays of full-blown mango blossoms – his sharp arrows,
Honey-bees in rows – the humming bowstring:
Warrior-Spring set to break the hearts
of Love’s devotees, is now approaching, my love.
Spring, like that facilitator of love affairs, Kamadeva, is approaching and an outbreak of passion is to be expected. Mango blossoms are irresistible to bird and beast alike, as is vividly demonstrated by these lines:
Drunk on the honey of mango blossoms,
the koel rapturously kisses his mate…
There are other rapturous encounters involving mango blossoms. In Kalidasa’s play Sakuntala and the Ring of Recollection, translated by Barbara Stoler Miller, a maid plucks a mango bud and offers it to Kamadeva, thereby demonstrating its efficacy:
Mango-blossom bud,
I offer you to Love
As he lifts
his bow of passion.
Be the first
of his flower arrows
aimed at lonely girls
with lovers far away!
Mango flowers are venerated in Sanskrit epics and poems as arsenal vital for seduction, but their appearance in recent literature also delineates the essence of summer. Ruskin Bond, without whom one would never have known the unsullied tints of schoolboy descriptions, writes in a piece titled ‘A Vagabond in Delhi’, “For who can forget that summer brings the jasmine, whose sweet scent drifts past us on the evening breeze along with the stronger odours and scents of mango blossom, raat-ki-rani and cowdung smoke.” Resonating with Kalidasa’s account of nature’s carnival (but devoid of the ancient poet’s ecstatic sensual undertones), Bond’s narrative places the mango blossom as a sensory prop, integral to the season’s upsurge of swooning flora.
The Wire for more