When three Indian peace activists traveled to Pakistan in 2022, they received a mango sapling from their hosts. Two years on, the token of friendship is growing into a new variety of fruit, and a new kind of cross-border bond.
Mango is known as the king of fruits in both India and Pakistan, where it is celebrated in poetry, has served as a tool of diplomacy and a symbol of status, and prominently features in culinary traditions.
There are more than 1,000 varieties of mango grown in India, differing in shape, color, flavor, texture and size. Soon, one more is going to join them. It will be called Dosti, or “friendship,” and is created from a mix of Pakistani and Indian fruit.
The mango tree is growing in Pune in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, planted by Nitin Sonawane, Yogesh Vishwamitra and Jalandharnath Channole — activists who preach Mahatma Gandhi’s principles of positive peacemaking and in 2022 spent almost a month in the Pakistani cities of Lahore and Karachi.
“When we were leaving Pakistan on Aug. 14, 2022, a friend Irshad Ahmad gave me a mango sapling. He said: ‘Carry this message of love from us’,” Vishwamitra told Arab News.
“We brought the sapling to Pune. On Aug. 22, 2022, we planted the sapling ... we were skeptical whether the plant will take roots or not. But it got new leaves and it spread wide. Then we decided to graft the mango tree with the Indian mango in January.”
Vishwamitra is a disciple of Satish Kumar, an Indian British nuclear disarmament advocate and former monk who walked more than 8,000 miles in the 1960s from New Delhi to Moscow, Paris, London and Washington, D.C. — the capitals of the world’s earliest nuclear-armed countries.
“My guru told me that if you want to do peace work you should walk in India as well as in each of the neighboring countries,” Vishwamitra said.
“I am lucky to have walked in Sri Lanka in 2016 and 2018, and in Pakistan in 2022, and 2023 in Bangladesh.”
He hopes that the Indian-Pakistani mango variety that he grows will, in the future, be grafted with Bangladeshi fruit and become a “living symbol of friendship.”
India, Pakistan and Bangladesh share decades of rivalry and violence stemming from the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent, in which new borders drawn by British colonial officials created a Muslim majority in West and East Pakistan, and a Hindu majority in India.
The partition was one of the largest migrations in history, forcing about 15 million people to swap countries in a political upheaval that cost more than 1 million lives. Bitterness and hostility over the events remains to this day, especially in official relations, as in the years that followed the partition the countries also fought several wars.
India and Pakistan, especially, have become arch-rivals on the international stage — a condition that the three Indian activists believe does not reflect the real sentiment of people in the two countries.
For Sonawane, who has visited 50 countries since he left his engineering career in 2013 to focus on peace activism, the visit to Pakistan was particularly eye-opening.
“When we went to Pakistan people gave us so much love and care. We felt that the issue between India and Pakistan is not a people-to-people issue. It is more at the political level. It was a big learning experience for us,” he told Arab News.
“People supported us, they allowed shelter in their home, they offered food and took us around. They took care of us for 24 days.”
Through initiatives creating grassroots bonds, he hoped to make a change in relations between the countries. The Indian-Pakistani mango tree was a symbolic representation that it was possible.
“Mango marriage is a new hope,” Sonawane said. “The mango sapling is not just a biological plant or a botanical plant; it is a deep connection of love and compassion.”
