Owing to its nativity, perennial abundance and affordability, the banana is India’s go-to fruit for nearly every occasion and is deeply woven into the country’s cultural fabric.A decade ago when I was newly married, I stopped by a roadside fruit stall in the South Indian town of Nagercoil near my in-law’s home to pick up some bananas for a religious ceremony. I gawked at the bunches of this nutraceutical fruit, ranging from the usual shades of yellow to varying hues of red and purple. They hung upended on hooks from the stand’s tinned roof as if they were prized possessions.Each bunch was tagged with a local variety name – poovan, chevvazhai, matti pazzham and so on. I had never seen such a multitude of banana varieties in all my years growing up in Hyderabad, the capital of India's Telangana state, around 1,200km north of Nagercoil. I just knew the modest banana simply as aratipandu in the Telugu language (and vaazhaipazham in Tamil and kela in Hindi). But here in Nagercoil, there were some 12 to 15 varieties, each with a distinct name and purpose. Suddenly, life seemed simpler before marriage, as I got indoctrinated into the land of bananas.The banana has been India’s most versatile and revered fruit from time immemorial. Owing to its nativity, perennial abundance and affordability, it’s the go-to fruit for nearly every occasion, and the banana tree in its entirety is deeply woven into the country’s cultural fabric. While indigenous varieties are cultivated in home gardens across India, they grow profusely both domestically and wild in places like Nagercoil, largely due to the warm and humid tropical climate and fertile, loamy soil conditions found in regions abutting the Western Ghats in South India.The banana is believed to be one of the world’s earliest and most cultivated fruits and has travelled far and wide from its humble origins in India and South-East Asia. Today, it’s one of the world’s most-consumed fruits, and even during these pandemic times, comforting and easy-to-make banana bread has been trending on Google searches around the world.Historical records mention that Alexander the Great was impressed with the exotic taste of the kadali phalam (the Sanskrit name for the banana) and carried the fruit from India to the Middle East, where it was rechristened as banan (an Arabic word for finger) by Arab traders. It later reached Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean during the 15th Century, and then headed north to Bermuda. From Bermuda, bananas were shipped to England as novelty fruits during the 17th and 18th Centuries. And in 1835, head gardener of Chatsworth Estate in Derbyshire, Joseph Paxton, cultivated and grew a new yellow variety and named it musa cavendishii, after the family name of his employer, William Cavendish.