By Bhogtoram Mawroh and Chenxiang Ch Marak
The article ‘Much Ado about the Khasi Mandarin’ by H. H. Mohrmen, published on January 8, 2023, made for a very engaging read. Drawing from his own experience of having grown up in Nongtalang, a village in the War Jaintia area, where his family had their own orange orchard, he asserted that the export of oranges from Meghalaya is not a very recent phenomenon. He referred to his own relative, Khyllaw sia Lyngdoh, who at least transported, if not exported, oranges from Nongtalang to Bangladesh via Tamabil in Dawki. This fascinating information was provided with the intention of proving that the cultivation of oranges and cross-border trade has a very long history in the state, especially along the southern part of Meghalaya. He is very correct. In fact, the history of cross-border trade goes much further back in history, and it informs a lot about the region (including Meghalaya) and how it wasn’t really a frontier but a vibrant and bustling zone of interaction that had global consequences.
In the section on agriculture in the seminal work ‘The Khasis’ by PRT Gurdon, there is a detailed description of the tools used, types of agricultural land, farming practices, and the crops grown by the Khasis. Much of these are still in practice, showing continuity, which in the past may have been seen as backward by some but which is now recognized as a game-changing solution for bringing about a sustainable food system that not only provides nourishment and a healthy diet but also makes it resilient to climate change and other environmental shocks. The FAO’s (Food and Agriculture Organization) White/Wiphala Paper on Indigenous Peoples’ Food Systems, published in 2021 on the eve of the UNFSS (United National Food System Summit) in New York, made that case very strongly. India’s 2022 Guidelines of the National Mission on Natural Farming and Meghalaya’s own 2023 State Organic and Natural Farming Policy are but a logical outcome of the new paradigm that is being pursued globally. Coming back to the book ‘The Khasis’, among the crops enumerated, orange got a special mention and two full paragraphs were dedicated towards describing how to grow the crop. But what was most intriguing was the mention of a thriving trade that was already taking place long before the British came into the picture.
Gurdon mentioned in one of the passages that oranges from the Khasi Hills were famous for their excellence and were an important crop in the southern portion, i.e., the War area. They were known in Calcutta as the Chhatak or Sylhet orange, which could be due to the fact that they were originally sourced from the area. Interestingly, in a documentary on the Khasis residing in Bangladesh titled ‘Behind the Green’ Jonhinal Kongwang, the Khasi headman of Cholitachara Punjee village claims that Sylhet is actually a corruption of ‘Shella Hat’ (Hat means market), after the name of Shella, a village in the East Khasi hills of present-day Meghalaya. So, Shella appears to have been a very important trade center in the pre-colonial period, with oranges and most certainly areca nut and betel leaves being important commodities. Citing another colonial officer, Sir George Birdwood, Gurdon further informed that oranges and lemons from Garhwal, Sikkim, and Khasia (Khasi Hills) had been carried by Arab traders into Syria. From there, the Crusaders helped to propagate them throughout southern Europe. Oranges, he remarked, appeared to be indigenous to these hills. And in fact, that is exactly the case.
On January 31, 2009, Down To Earth, one of India’s most respectable magazines focused on the politics of environment and development, published an article titled ‘Local citrus goes global’. According to the report, India and to be more specific Nokrek in Garo Hills, is the origin of all citrus species in the world. Though Nokrek was formally designated as a Biosphere Reserve in 2009 by UNESCO, a section had already been declared earlier as the National Citrus Gene Sanctuary after the Indian wild orange (Citrus indica), which is considered to be the progenitor of all citrus species in the world, was found there. The story of how it was domesticated, however, is a little complicated and still largely unknown.
According to the 2021 paper ‘Genomic insights into citrus domestication and its important agronomic traits’ by Muhammad Junaid Rao, Hao Zuo, and Qiang Xu, most of the commercial cultivars in the world today are either from mandarin (Citrus reticulata), pummelo (C. maxima), and citron (C. medica) or their hybrids. For example, sweet orange (Citrus sinensis) is known to be a hybrid between pummelo and mandarin. The authors are of the opinion that the three species probably originated from different places: citron and pummelo are most likely to have originated in a triangle region of northwestern Yunnan (China), northeastern India (Nokrek in the Garo Hills), and northern Myanmar, whereas mandarin is most likely to have originated in Mangshan, a branch of the Nanling mountains (South China). This finding becomes very significant when compared with findings on the ancient migrations that took place into the subcontinent.
The 2015 paper ‘Y-chromosome diversity suggests southern origin and Paleolithic back-wave migration of Austro-Asiatic speakers from eastern Asia to the Indian subcontinent’ by Zhang and colleagues reported that Austro-Asiatic populations (which include the Khasi-Jaintia) display a high frequency of O2a1-M95 (Y-chromosome) lineages, which serve as an effective genetic marker for tracing the prehistoric movements and origins of these populations. According to them, this lineage originated in southern China and then migrated from mainland Southeast Asia (Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaysia) to India. In this, the authors agreed with the 2015 paper ‘A late Neolithic expansion of Y chromosomal haplogroup O2a1-M95 from east to west’ by Arunkumar and colleagues but differed on the dates (10,000 years instead of around 6000 years), citing different methods used for age estimation. So, the proto-Khasi-Jaintia must have originally migrated from southern China into the area around Laos and then into the North East, with a group continuing into Central India, where it interbred with the local indigenous population (most probably Dravidian), giving rise to the Munda. And while they were moving, they must have brought with them the mandarin orange, which later became the Khasi mandarin orange, for which Meghalaya was awarded the GI (Geographical Indication) tag in 2014. But it was not just the fruit but the story of its domestication, which must have traveled together.
The 2018 paper ‘Genome of Wild Mandarin and Domestication History of Mandarin’ by Wang and colleagues argue that there are abundant wild mandarin forms in the Nanling region of South China, from which the semi-domesticated and cultivated varieties were domesticated. According to them, the region is one of the important cultivation centres of mandarin orange for at least 4000 years. A local version of how the mandarin orange came to be grown by the Khasi community provides some insights into how that might have taken place. During a field visit to one of the villages in the Sohra region, an old lady informed that sometime in the past, there was a woman who used to go to the forest to collect fruits and other wild vegetables. One day she came across a wild fruit, which she found to be very tasty. Excited, she brought the fruit to her village and planted the seed, which later grew into the mandarin orange that is now endemic to the area. Most probably, the story must be a common one held by people from a previous time when they were in South China. When they arrived, along with the fruit, they brought the story, which has been passed on through generations.
Garos also have a version of how they domesticated the different citrus species. For a long time, they never domesticated any of the citrus species because they were available in plenty in the forest. These were used for food as well as for medicinal purposes. But over time, as the forest dwindled, they started domesticating many of the species so as to protect them from going extinct. The local names of the species that were domesticated are Chambil, Memang Narang, Kakji, Tematchi, Serenga, Atol, Jambura/Chambura, and Chinara, to name a few. Memang Narang is in fact the Indian wild orange, i.e., Citrus indica, mentioned earlier.
Tony Joseph mentions in his 2018 book ‘Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From’ that around 2000 BCE (i.e., 4000 years ago), there was increasing contact between the sub-continent and the east through both trade and migration, which could have brought not just the Austro-Asiatic populations (which include the Khasi-Jaintia) but also the Tibeto-Burman-language speakers as well. Among the latter, the Garo, who are part of the Bodo-Garo language branch, which also includes groups like Dimasa and Tripuri, must have been one of the earliest groups to arrive. This is because they are one of the most widespread groups in the region, having a linguistic connection to groups like the Konyak (though considered to be a Naga group, they do not actually speak the Kuki-Chin-Mizo language that other Naga groups speak) and the Jingpho or Singpho (also known as Kachin in Myanmar), who are found across the international borders.
As a matter of fact, there are Garo villages in present-day West Bengal as well. This means domestication of pummelo and citron must have possibly happened after 2000 BCE, when the Garos arrived in what is today the Garo Hills and settled around Nokrek. Since they stayed in close proximity with the Khasis with whom they intermarried (the Lyngngam/Megam being the by-product of such a union), they must have exchanged food crops, which must have included citrus species, giving rise to more new species. Then, through exchanges, these must have dispersed to different parts of the world. The Arab traders, as mentioned by Gurdon, must have played an important role in that. The paper by Muhammad Junaid Rao, Hao Zuo, and Qiang Xu contains a map, which suggests that citron and lemon from the North East must have reached the Middle East in such a way. Palestinians, in fact, have used oranges, watermelons, olives, and eggplants to represent their indigenous national identity and connection to the land as a form of resistance against the occupation of Palestine by illegal immigrants from Europe and America.
So the story of oranges is not a recent one but one that goes back thousands of years. It involves migration, domestication, international trade, and traditional folk stories that go back many generations. But most importantly, it’s a heritage of the indigenous peoples of Meghalaya, the Khasi-Jaintia and Garo, which they have shared with the world. And hopefully, they will continue to do so in the future as well.
(The views expressed in the article are those of the authors and do not reflect in any way his affiliation to any organization or institution)