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

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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.

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 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.

Roy Moxham's The Great Hedge of India fairly jumped off the shelf at me as I scanned new titles at the library. I enjoy learning about India and thought myself knowledgeable, yet this idea was new to me. I couldn't resist checking out the book and peeling away yet another surprising layer of the onion that is India.

A 1,500-mile-long hedge existed in India during Queen Victoria's reign? Who ever heard of such a thing? This first incredulous question led to more such as how? Where? And Why?

Moxham answers all those quandries and more in his multi-year quest to discover the remnants of the hedge in various parts of rural India. The hedge, it turns out, really did exist, although precious little remains. It was a tool to faciliate collection of the dreaded and inhumane British salt tax.

Read this book to savor and smell India. Read it to follow and understand Moxham's obsession with the hedge. Read it to comprehend another case of "man's inhumanity to man." Most of all, if think you know the Subcontinent, read it to show yourself there's still more to learn of this incredible place.

This little book describes the author's initially quixotic quest to find the remnants of the world's longest hedge, briefly mentioned in an tome he finds in a used book store. Moxham discovers that British imperialists of the 19th century built a man-made barrier more than two thousand miles long, reaching across the Indian subcontinent. This hedge was designed to prevent the smuggling of salt from parts of India with low salt taxes to the area of Bengal, where salt taxes were very high. As Moxham expands his research into the history of this barrier, he discovers with growing horror the impact of imperial revenue policy on the lives of ordinary Indians, many of whom died because they could not afford the salt they needed in their diets. This previously neglected aspect of British imperial history makes one wonder how many other horrors lie buried in the dry pages of the Empire's official journals. Moxham, who writes in simple, declarative language, sometimes devotes too much space to the details of his encounters with modern-day Indians, though some of those encounters are charming. It is unfortunate that his book does not include a single photograph, such as one of the remaining piece of hedge he found. Michael Michaud, Vienna, Austria

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 that Moxham has. And while, in itself, a hedge, even a very long one, doesn't seem to be very significant, laughable though it may be, the story of this particular hedge provides an extraordinarily vivid and disquieting window into the relentless iron machinery of the Raj. Moxham writes in an engaging, open, unornamented style. I suspect his fine book has benefitted from the attentions of a very skillful, very demanding editor - a reminder that every writer is well-served by a good editor. As he tells his story, Moxham provides enough - but not too much - background about the salt tax and its political and economic origins. Having passed that way myself, I can attest that Moxham's concise, uninflected descriptions of the villages in India in which he stayed and the people he encountered in them really ring true. They are the perfect seasoning for his book. Moxham's experience in the countryside reminds us that despite India's growing middle class, with its automobiles, refrigerators and westernized houses, despite the fashionable Bombay beauties who now favor dresses to saris, despite the thousands of computer scientists and programmers in Bangalore, despite the country's frenetic drive to be modern, for hundreds of millions of Indians, life is not very different today from what it was a decade or a century or a millennium ago.

The book starts with a sort of quirky quest -- to find out more about a "great hedge"!! in India. The investigation leads into a deeper exploration of what the British presence in India was really all about. Anybody who is interested in India will want to read this book.

THE GREAT HEDGE OF INDIA by Roy Moxham could have been subtitled 'What I learned about salt, smuggling, tariffs, trade, oppression, taxes and death in India' but it probably wouldn't have sold many copies. Although Moxham set out to uncover the story of a huge hedge the British built from Pakistan across India (along a route almost as long as the southwest U.S./Mexico border) he soon discovered he had a much bigger tale. The real story was the reason for the hedge--to control the movement of taxable commodities especially salt--and the effect of the hedge on the lives of Indians. Moxham says when India's Independence from Britain was declared, Ganhdi was in the midst of a day of silence (he was silent one day a week). He did not speak, but the first thing he wrote on a piece of paper was, "get rid of the salt tax."

Moxham says, unlike sugar, salt is not a luxury. Although those with high blood pressure are warned to limit their salt intake, humans in general cannot survive without salt in their diet. The human body contains about six ounces of salt--salt is critical for the body processes. Every day, the body loses salt it must replace. Failure to replace the lost salt leads to everything from delirium and fainting to death.

Creatures who eat mostly vegetarian diets (some humans, cattle, goats, other herbivores) must obtain salt from non-meat sources, via salt licks or by adding salt to their food. As the Hindu diet is vegetarian, these folks are very dependent on acquiring salt from non-meat sources. In addition, Indians live in a hot climate and they and their animals loose a great deal of salt every day through sweat. And Cholera, Malaria, Typhoid, and other fever-diseases endemic in India lead to the additional discharge of body fluids (sweat, vomiting, excretia) and exacerbate salt loss.

Moxham says salt taxes are as old as humankind--in fact the word salary comes from the Latin term for payment in salt. Imposing the salt tax on Indians, the British East India company perpetuated a practice carried out by the Moghul princes. However, the BEI enforced the tax so well--including even the poor in their net--they made the lives of many Indians unliveable. In the 1700s and 1800s, BEI officials (and the corrupt politicians they paid off) made huge profits from the salt taxes. Many of BEI officials returned to England, purchased titles and estates, and some became members of the aristocracy. Many other British who never set foot in India made fortunes from their investments in the company.

After the British government took over the rule of India from the BEI it could have dropped the salt tax but did not. Ironically, while millions of Irish were dying as a result of the British authorities mismanagement of the potato famine, millions of Indians were dying owing to a callous disregard by British authorities regarding the salt tax and the inability of the average Indian to pay the tax.

Moxham has done a good job of providing a slice of his own life and his own interests in the context of the book. I have only two criticisms--why I cannot give it five stars.

First, the context of the tale is missing. I don't think it's fruitful to refer to "British" oppression. While one can become very angry about the salt tax, it's important to remember the context. Only a select few benefitted from the imposition of these taxes. While the British authorities were causing disasters outside Britain, they weren't doing much better inside. Work houses for the poor and the deaths of young women unfortunate enough to find themselves pregnant without the benefit of marriage were the norm in the 19th Century. The shipment of debtors and others who had committed "crimes" to Australia occurred daily. One has only to think of the stories of George Eliot (Adam Bede), Thomas Hardy, the Brontes (Jane Eyre), and Charles Dickens to be reminded that during the 19th Century, life in Britain was difficult for many of it's citizens. The sins of the salt tax lie as they always have, not with the disenfranchised or the working class, but with those who govern them--those in league with commercial interests. The working classes of England had much in common with the poor of India and Ireland--or the U.S. for that matter.

My second criticism is less serious--Moxham's book is heavily reliant on a discussion of maps. He even traveled with a GPS (global positioning system) which he used to locate himself on the "map". He speaks of maps discovered in dusty drawers in various museums and maps referred to in India. Sadly, the only map he provides is a little hand drawn map in the front of the text. I would have liked a drawing at the beginning of every section--a sort of "you are here" map. Owing to my job, I have maps on hand and I could locate most of the various places he describes. If you don't own a map of India, you may find Moxham's book difficult to follow.

The book is the story of an Englishman's chance discovery (actually rediscovery) of the construction of a barrier comparable to the Great Wall of China. The authors story of the search is an interesting part of the story, but the historical investigation of the barrier, the motivation behind it, the details n the effects of salt deprivation, the comparative analysis of salt taxation in Europe and China, all combine to make this one of the best reads I can remember. Highly recommended!

This book does a wonderful job of giving the reader a glimps of both modern and British India. The discussion of the health and economic impact of the British salt tax was very well done. I enjoyed reading the book and look forward to visiting some of the places described.