If someone tells us to imagine a mango tree on which there is a mango with two different skins and two different layers of pulp, each with a different taste, we would exclaim that such a fruit cannot exist. It is impossible! But there is a man who hails from Uttar Pradesh, who has made this possible. He has been nicknamed the Mango Magician and he has truly lived up to that sobriquet.
Every summer all of us are gripped by mango madness. We try to eat as many of these luscious fruits as we can before the season ends. But Kalimullah Khan of Uttar Pradesh carries this madness one step further. He lies awake night after night thinking of mangoes, their cultivation, development and preservation. He has become a mango philosopher and can tell you about the way lives of mangoes resemble the lives of human beings. A few years ago even the New York Times wrote an article about this extraordinary man.
His nicknames are Mango Man and the Mango Magician. Hailing from Malihabad near Lucknow, Khan is a seventh class dropout who has climbed to the topmost rungs of success as a cultivator of different varieties of mangoes. His skills and relentless efforts have earned him the Padma Shri from the government of India in 2008.
His hometown Malihabad is famous for mangoes. Hundreds of varieties of mangoes including the Chausa, Langda, Safeda and Dasseri are grown and exported from the orchards of this region. It is Kalimullah Khan who has made a big contribution to the development of the mango industry of this district. From far and wide people come to his orchard to see his amazing trees and taste the exquisite mangoes that he has grown.
It is said that about 200 years ago, Nawab Faqir Muhammad Khan Goya who was the Commander-in-Chief of the army of the then Nawab of Oudh, fell in love with Malihabad because of its soil and climate. He requested permission from the Nawab of Oudh to grow mangoes here and then established the first mango orchard in Malihabad. His great-grandson was the famous Urdu poet Josh Malihabadi who later settled in Pakistan.
But to come back to the present days, it is Kalimullah Khan who is continuing the tradition of developing exotic varieties of mangoes from this locality. Using the asexual propagation technique of grafting, he has developed several new varieties of mangoes, some of which he has named after celebrities such as cricketer Sachin Tendulkar and political leader Akhilesh Yadav.
“I have been looking after my family business since 1957. My family has been involved in growing mangoes for more than 150 years. I have experimented by developing different varieties of mangoes on the same tree after I began the multiple grafting processes many years ago,” Khan told NDTV once.
Pointing to one tree he said: “This is not just one single tree. It is a whole mango orchard within itself. It has 300 different varieties of mangoes growing on its branches. Just like two human fingerprints are not the same, no two mangoes on this tree are the same,” he says. As his nickname suggests, Kalimullah Khan is truly a Mango Magician and we can only applaud his amazing feats.
| 
