Banaras-born green-skinned mango that stays green even when ripe — loved for its complex balance of sweetness, acidity, and a faintly resinous aroma.
Hindi for 'lame' — the original Langra tree near Banaras (Varanasi) was reportedly tended by a lame sadhu, and the cultivar took its name from him. The unusual etymology has stuck for two centuries.
The Langra — Banarasi Langra in its native eastern Uttar Pradesh — is among the most distinctive mangoes in India and the only major commercial cultivar that stays predominantly green even at full ripeness. Its name is the Hindi word for "lame": legend holds that the original tree, planted in Banaras (Varanasi) around 250 years ago, belonged to a lame sadhu whose orchard produced the seedling. The unusual etymology stuck, and Langra is now grown across eastern Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, Odisha, and into Pakistan.
The cultivar's appearance throws off newcomers. A ripe Langra is an oblong-ovoid 200–350 g fruit with smooth lemon-green skin that yellows only slightly at the shoulder — many first-time eaters think the fruit is unripe and put it back. The internal flesh, however, is a clear lemon-yellow, very fine-grained, mostly fibre-free, with a small flat stone. Brix sits in the 16–20° range — lower than Dasheri's pure sweetness — but Langra makes up for it with the most complex flavour of any North Indian mango, balancing sugar with a noticeable tartness and a faintly resinous, almost turpentine aroma that connoisseurs prize.
The Langra season is late, from mid-July to early August — a few weeks behind Dasheri — which makes it a north Indian summer's farewell mango. The cultivar's growing range hugs the Gangetic plain: Banaras and the wider Doab in UP, then east into Muzaffarpur and Bhagalpur in Bihar (where a regional sub-strain called Bhagalpuri Langra is recognised), and into the Malda region of West Bengal. From Banaras the cultivar travelled to what was then West Pakistan via Partition-era horticulturalists; Pakistani Langra now competes in the same Gulf and UK export markets as the Indian original.
Because of its complex profile, Langra is the great processing mango of North India. The under-ripe green fruit produces some of the country's best aam panna (a charred-mango-with-cumin summer cooler), and the ripe pulp goes into chutneys, pickles (notably the Bihari Aam ka achaar), and into the layered mango-saffron pedas of Banaras's old sweet shops. Eaten fresh, Langra is preferred sliced rather than sucked — its firmer flesh and complex flavour reward chewing.