Great Hedge of India: The Search for the Living Barrier That Divided a People

Amazingly, something as vast as this hedge, built under British supervision a century and a half ago, had disappeared from the 'history' of that time and place. Even more amazing, the author hit on this story totally by accident. We travel with him as he searches for remnants of this massive but forgotten relic of the Raj. Moxham, with the help of both friends and strangers, travels with limited budget to rural areas of India during his holidays for several years. Written in an informal style, I got a real sense of the area and the fun of the chase. For an 'off the beaten path' foray into the history of India in the 19th century, grab a copy of this and go exploring for several hours. There is a short glossary, chart of weights and measurements and bibliography in the back and a general area map in the front.

The author Roy Moxham set out to uncover the story of a huge hedge the British built from Pakistan across India. He discovered though a much bigger story of oppression and how a large corporation sought to dominate a people. The hedge was built to control the movement of taxable commodities like salt and had a huge impact on the lives of Indians. The salt tax is a key part of the story and a key reason for the hedge. Taxes on salt are ages old, salary is the from the Latin for payment in salt. In imposing the salt tax on Indians, the British East India company perpetuated the previous practice of Moghul princes. Salt is so important to life because humans in general cannot survive without salt in their diet. The human body contains about six ounces of salt and salt is critical for the body processes. The body loses salt daily which must be replaced. Failure to replace lost salt can lead death and disease. The British East India company's salt tax affected every one, but none more so than the poor of India. The company made huge profits from the tax in the 1700s and 1800s. Many British aristocrats and businessmen made fortunes from their investments in the British East India company. After the British government took over the rule of India from the British East India company, it could have stopped the salt tax, but didn't. This is an eye-opening story. The only thing missing are detailed maps because Moxham frequently refers to and discusses maps of India.

Like many students of Indian history, I thought I knew it all. Imagine my surprise when I came across "The Great Hedge of India," by Roxy Moxham and discovered that the British had built a living barrier of hedges between British India and the Indian States. That this British-built Hadrian Wall of sorts, referred to as the Custom Line by the British in India, was meant to curb smuggling of the lowly common everyday household ingredient-salt!Moxham first stumbled across a reference to the Great Hedge in a lowly footnote in a book (aptly titled) "Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official." That footnote became a full-fledged obsession for Moxham who spent countless hours and days in libraries hunting for more information on this living hedge. His quest takes him to various parts of India to hunt for this living "Customs Line."This is a must read book for anyone interested in reading Indian history.

The picturesque and romantic aspects of the Raj make it easy to forget that apart from any other motives, British domination of India was based on economic control, exploitation and the accumulation of wealth. This was reflected in extraordinarily harsh policies - the direct and indirect employment of millions of plantation workers under conditions of near slavery, for example. Indians were prohibited by law from operating mechanized textile factories: instead, Indian cotton was exported to England were it was turned into finished goods - which was then exported and sold to Indians. And taxation, which, as it always does, fell most heavily on the poor, was confiscatory. The collection of taxes was relentless and evenhandedly, blandly inhumane. Crops might fail - they often did - and famine might result, but never tax forgiveness. The tax on salt, among life's most crucial commodities, was especially onerous. Incredible as it seems, in the 1840s, in an explosion of comic-opera zeal, the British taxing authority began establishing an enormous hedge which eventually stretched, in a meandering route, some 1200 miles from the Indus River in the north to Burhanpur in the center of the country. Its purpose was to prevent the smuggling of untaxed salt. Called the Customs Hedge, it consisted of more than 400 miles of live vegetation ten to fourteen high and six to eight feet thick, 475 miles of dry branches - gorse, bramble and the like - packed together into an impenetrable barrier, 300 miles of mixed live and dry hedge and, in a few very arid regions, six miles of stone wall. The construction and maintenance of the hedge required the labor of thousands, and was no less demanding than laying and maintaining a thousand-mile rail line. For all of that, changes (but not relaxation) in tax collection policies caused the Customs Hedge to be abruptly abandoned in 1879. In just a few years, nearly all evidence of the great hedge had disappeared. Raj officials were nothing if not thorough record keepers, and a good deal of information about the hedge survives in dusty annual customs reports. Despite this, by the late 20th century, the existence of the hedge had disappeared from historical consciousness. By chance, knowledge of this unlikely, if not bizarre creation was rediscovered by Roy Moxham, a book collector and student of history who in 1995 found a mention of the hedge in the memoirs of W.H. Sleeman, the resourceful and single-minded Englishman who stamped out Thugee in the 1820s. Intrigued, Moxham embarked on a five-year quest to determine if any vestiges of the great hedge remained. The project involved months of research in libraries and records offices in London and India and months of traveling around the Indian countryside, often on foot.For anyone interested in history, it's an enthralling narrative, simply and gracefully recounted in Moxham's 2001 book THE GREAT HEDGE OF INDIA. Most professional historians never get to make the kind discovery th

If you haven't heard of the Great Hedge of India, don't be surprised. Roy Moxham spent his every holiday in India, and thought he knew something of the nation, but when he came across an old book that mentioned the hedge, he had never heard of it. He found more references to it, did all the research he could, and then went on a quest to find it. _The Great Hedge of India: The Search for the Living Barrier that Divided a People_ (Carroll and Graf) is the delightful story of that quest. Moxham had the idea in the beginning that he was searching for a quintessentially British folly, but learned in his researches that it was a far-from-harmless monstrosity, "a terrible instrument of British oppression." He gives us the history of salt and of the salt tax, as well as salt physiology, and it's role in the deaths of millions in the last century. The salt tax and the hedge played a role in that sad story.Fortunately, while Moxham has to fill us in on such history (and the history of the comparable French tax on salt), he also has the much more pleasant task of telling us about his researches and his travels. We get to learn about his finding period maps, how difficult they were to read, and how he came to use the Global positioning System on his hunt. But the cheeriest parts of the story have to do with his visits with friends and strangers in India. He is able to describe with good humor the frustration of travel by motorized rickshaw, inexplicably efficient or inefficient trains, and pedestrian searches in the heat and dust of the Indian plains. His Indian friends were unflaggingly helpful. The strangers he met were almost always interested in his quest, although intensive farming and road building have wiped out almost all the traces of the hedge, and the community memory of it is almost entirely obliterated, too. They supported him when all seemed lost. This is fine travel writing.Moxham succeeded in his quest to find some remnant of the hedge, but more importantly, he has made history by rescuing it from obscurity. The hedge was an amazing physical achievement, but perhaps because its purpose was so ignominious people preserved little record of it. Anyone reading this fascinating book, however, will be impressed by the quest for the hedge, and that its history has not been lost.