Updated: 4 days ago
How South Asia’s iconic fruit left home and entered global culture
In Part 1 of our story on the mango, we discussed how this fruit was part of South Asian lives for centuries, and remains to stay so. If in South Asia the mango was a metaphor for life's richest ties—myth, memory, friendship—then it was only a matter of time before it became a story the world would carry, reshape, and consume.
Colonization, trade, and diplomacy during the early modern era (1500s onwards) uprooted not only goods exchange but also food and farming practices. Along the humid trade routes of the East India Companies, among the many treasures from the East, mangoes travelled. Seeds carefully packed for colonial gardens, descriptions of their ‘luscious flesh’ written into ship journals and diplomatic letters. By the 17th century, mango trees bloomed in the Caribbean, West Africa, and Brazil, while mangoes themselves acquired new roles—not as sacred symbols, but as exotic commodities and markers of wealth or influence.
One of the most surreal twists that placed the mango as a symbol of Maoist reforms came about in 1968, during a period of intense political upheaval known as the Cultural Revolution, the Pakistani Foreign Minister Mian Arshad Hussain gifted a crate of Pakistani mangoes to Chairman Mao Zedong. At that time, mangoes were an exotic rarity in China, and Mao himself wasn’t particularly interested in them—he didn't even eat them—but in a gesture both practical and symbolic, he re-gifted the mangoes to the Worker-Peasant Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Teams, factory workers who had helped suppress the violent student factions at Tsinghua University. The workers, unfamiliar with the fruit, interpreted it as a profound token of Mao’s personal gratitude and divine favour. Mangoes were paraded, sealed in wax, displayed in glass cases, and even boiled into water that workers ceremonially drank. The mango became a quasi-sacred object, and 'mango worship' swept across China as a unique (and strange) manifestation of the Cultural Revolution’s devotion culture.
Later, replicas of mangoes were mass-produced in wax and porcelain, and mango-themed items flooded Chinese markets—from bedsheets to enamelware. Though the ‘mango cult’ eventually faded, it left a lasting imprint on Chinese cultural memory: a tropical fruit, once symbolizing abundance and sweetness in South Asia, had been reframed into a divine emblem of political loyalty halfway across the world.
Yet even as the mango became imbued with the symbolism of different empires, its imagery persisted and evolved.
The distinctive mango shape, which had flourished for centuries in South Asian textiles, jewelry, and folk art, was exported along with fabrics. Through contact with Persian and Kashmiri artisans, the mango motif was stylized into the now-famous paisley pattern—a teardrop-shaped design that captivated the textile industries of Europe. By the 18th and 19th centuries, the paisley had become a fashion craze in Britain and France, a marker of the ‘exotic East’ prized by aristocrats and later bohemian circles in the 1960s and 70s. It remains to date, an abstracted yet perfectly associated symbol of the exotic East, of utopia, of faraway wonder, as the paisley.
The mango’s symbolism shifted with each crossing. What began as a sacred and intimate fruit of the tropics became a fashionable signifier of taste, leisure, and otherness in the world’s imagination. Still, the deeper meanings refused to vanish completely. In diaspora communities, in memory, in South Asian kitchens blooming across cities like London, Toronto, and Melbourne, the mango remained a portal to childhood, to festivals, to the heavy sweetness of a South Asian summer. Recipes travelled too—mango pickles, chutneys, lassis—and with them, stories of migration, resilience, and belonging. Still today, to taste mango is to taste paradise; this has not changed.
