- Across Kerala, traditional agroecosystems have been steadily reshaped by land fragmentation, road expansion, and the shift from mixed homesteads to more enclosed forms of landholding.
- Indigenous mango varieties such as Chandrakaran, which have been a part of village commons, are now dwindling and with them the memory, knowledge, and the culture of sharing in villages.
- A landrace disappears when it ceases to be named, shared, propagated, and valued. There is a need for a systematic documentation of such landraces.
- The views in the commentary are that of the author.
In many rural villages of Kerala, the Indigenous mango trees were once more than just a tree. These trees meant shade, season, memory, and public abundance. People named such trees — naattu manga (country mango). The term did not refer to a single botanical variety, but to local mango landraces, trees that had emerged, adapted, and persisted within village landscapes over generations. They stood in homesteads, along roadsides, near paddy fields as well as in school grounds, but its fruits belonged to many. Their ownership was often legible on paper, but in practice their fruits moved across households and compounds. A naattu manga belonged, in a moral sense, to the village.
Across Kerala, traditional agroecosystems have been steadily reshaped by land fragmentation, compound walls, real estate pressures, road expansion, and the shift from mixed homesteads to more enclosed forms of landholding. The loss is not only ecological; it is also cultural. When a large old mango tree is cut, a village does not merely lose fruit. It loses a seasonal meeting point, a taste archive, and a lineage of local adaptation that may never be properly named before it disappears.
Scientifically, these trees belong to the species Mangifera indica, but socially they belonged to a wider commons. A 2015 biodiversity appraisal described mango as a keystone species of Kerala homestead gardens. Many of these local varieties under M. indica persist only as scattered trees in homesteads rather than as formal orchards. Therefore, to conserve these Indigenous mango varieties from across the state, intensive surveys, collection , and maintenance is required. Today, these trees are becoming rarer. Not only because they are being cut, but because the idea that sustained them — the village commons — is fading.
My own understanding of this loss begins in Edathutty, a village in Kannur district, with an Indigenous mango variety called Chandrakaran, which is a bite-sized, highly flavourful mango. Its fruits were rich orange, intensely sweet, strongly flavoured, and fibrous in the satisfying way many local mangoes are. Chandrakaran is one among many Indigenous mango landraces of Kerala. Kerala Agricultural University lists it among the state’s recognised mango varieties with high Vitamin C and fibre content and describes it as juicy and especially suitable for tender mango pickle. Older horticultural work from Kerala also places Chandrakaran among the state’s polyembryonic mango types, a biologically-important trait because polyembryonic seeds can produce nucellar seedlings that are often genetically very close to the mother tree. Polyembryonic mangoes can sometimes be propagated from seed with greater uniformity than ordinary mangoes, although not every seedling will necessarily perform identically in field conditions. In a state where many local varieties historically moved from hand-to-hand through seeds rather than formal nursery systems, that trait may have helped some lineages persist.
Yet persistence is not the same as security. My parents, both farmers, had tried for years to propagate the Chandrakaran that we knew in our village, in vain. Then, a small weak seedling emerged by the roadside edge of our property. My mother watered it, manured it, and refused to give up on it. Years later it fruited, and to everyone’s surprise, the fruit was Chandrakaran. This year, 2026, is the fifth season it has borne fruit.
Now the shift is from horticulture to ethics. If a tree like this carries the memory of a village, who does it belong to? The road-facing location of our tree matters. Anyone passing by can see it. Anyone who knew the older village culture of naattu manga would recognise what such a tree meant. I found myself having a difficult conversation with my mother about whether the tree should be kept open in spirit, not hoarded, not treated simply as property behind a boundary, but allowed to continue the older custom of feeding neighbours. The tree had brought back more than a taste. It had brought back an idea of village life that is now under pressure.
There is surprisingly little peer-reviewed literature focused specifically on Chandrakaran’s morphological and genetic traits, which in itself is a problem. Chandrakaran here is just an example of a local mango variety, but this story can be related to several such regional varieties such as moovandan, mallissery, gomanga, kilichundan etc. Much of what exists about local mangoes survives as lived knowledge rather than as formal description.
KAU lists Chandrakaran as valued for pickle mango, and local market reporting from Kochi in 2019 noted it selling at around ₹80 per kg, roughly double the price of some other local varieties in market that season. What we do not yet have is enough systematic documentation of such landraces before older trees and the knowledge attached to them vanish.
An interesting example of why awareness matters is that of the Kuttiattoor mango. Kuttiattoor, also from Kannur district, became the first mango from Kerala to receive GI recognition in 2021, after efforts involving farmers, the state agriculture department, and Kerala Agricultural University. Official and semi-official descriptions emphasise its orange-yellow flesh, excellent taste and flavour, and clean, speckle-free ripe skin.
Just as important is the social geography of the fruit: reporting on Kuttiattoor notes that it is not grown as a conventional orchard crop but dispersed through homesteads across the village landscape. In other words, even a market-recognised mango retains the imprint of community distribution and shared regional identity. GI recognition does not automatically solve marketing or conservation problems, but it gives a landrace public visibility, legal identity, and at least the possibility of a premium that can motivate people to keep trees standing.
A landrace does not disappear only when the last tree dies. It begins to disappear when it ceases to be named, shared, propagated, and valued. Chandrakaran may never receive a GI tag. Many local mangoes may not, but the principle remains the same. Recognition creates incentives. Documentation creates memory. Conservation begins before rarity becomes extinction.
The survival of these varieties depends not just on their presence, but on recognition. Knowing what such a tree holds: its taste, its lineage, its place in the village, is the first step towards conserving this agro-biodiversity.
Banner image: A Chandrakaran mango tree filled with fruit from Niranam village, Pathanamthitta district. Image by Amritha Jaiprakash Kurup.
Femi Ezhuthupallickal Benny is a doctoral researcher at University College London. A taxonomist by training, her research focuses on the ecology of wasps.
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