THE GREAT HEDGE of INDIA

THE  GREAT  HEDGE  of  INDIA

It is often said that ‘Fact is stranger than fiction’, and it is indeed true beyond imagination in this case. The East India Company built an approximately 20ft wide and 12 ft high Hedge from Orrisa, encircling MP and going up to the end of Punjab. It can be called – The Great Hedge –   and surprisingly almost 100% of India’s populations have never heard of this. One wonders at the strategy used by the powers of the time to completely obliterate this mind boggling fact from public memory.

A traveler in India in the 1870s would have come across a strange problem. He couldn’t walk from the western parts of India to the east in the Terai region without encountering an enormous hedge made of babool, prickly pear, karaunda and other shrubs! Where he could find paths to go across, a police chowki greeted him — which had both police and customs officials! If the poor traveller was to be carrying a precious commodity called salt, then the customs officials would have a field day, levying a heavy tax for bringing salt over the great barrier. The tax levied was rupees three per maund, the highest in the whole country.

But what indeed was this hedge, and what purpose did it serve? It was officially called the Inland Customs Line and ran from the Indus in the Punjab to the Mahanadi in Odisha, cutting across the heart of India. It started in Punjab, ran south east to the precincts of Kanpur, then swung south to Burhanpur before turning east and stretching up to Sambalpur in today’s Odisha. At every four miles there was a police cum customs outpost.

Nearly all information about this Hedge is from a book put together labouriously by an Englishman Roy Moxham, and I have taken mostly from it.

Roy Moxham embarked on a quest recently to find traces of this hedge, and penned down his experience in a book called The Great Hedge of India. When Moxham went looking for it in 1996, he couldn’t find a trace. Sadly, he found most of the hedge extinct, except for a small patch near Etawah.

Moxham tells of a chance discovery in 1995, of a reference to a gigantic 1500 mile long hedge that the British had grown across nineteenth-century India. It describes his efforts to find its remains. There are no previous books about this hedge.

Apart from a search for a piece of forgotten history, he describes a personal quest. Chapters on the history of the customs hedge, and tales of the men who built it, are interspersed with chapters on his hunt for its remnants. The book tells of his searches - at the beginning, merely on a whim; later as an obsession. It tells of how he looked for the elusive hedge, first in libraries and archives, and then on the ground in India. He took lessons in Hindi, and taught himself land navigation. As he researched, he found that the hedge was not merely a piece of eccentricity, but was actually an instrument of oppression, an act of greed by The East India Company to fill its coffers. It was used to collect a tax on salt, set so high, that many Indians suffered from salt starvation.

He made three trips to India involving journeys to remote villages and bandit infested places, meetings with many unusual people, humorous incidents and many disappointments. It seemed that all traces and memories of the customs hedge had disappeared, until, on the final expedition in 1998, his perseverance was rewarded.

Moxham went looking for traces of this living monument to British hegemony and persistence more than a century after it was built . For him, the search began with the purchase of a used book, Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official, by Sir William Sleeman, which happened to mention the hedge. Other sources were few and hard to find, and as Moxham learned more about it he found that it had been almost entirely forgotten.

Still, he was determined to learn the story of this quixotic piece of India’s colonial history. Over the course of two years, Moxham searched along the old Customs Line for any trace—or memory—of the hedge. In most places, no one knew it had ever existed. Finally, he met an older man who remembered the hedge and took Moxham to the site where it once stood.

There, Moxham wrote, “Clusters of thorny acacias topped the embankment. Some were 20 feet high. Thorn-covered Indian plum trees barred the way .… We had found it at last.”

The hedge itself might have died, but the path it cut through the country was preserved, in a way. Later in India’s history, road designers looked at the long, flat embankments that cut through the country as an infrastructure asset. The hedge’s path was, in certain areas, transformed into a series of roads. Moxham had such a hard time finding any trace of the Great Hedge of India because its history had been paved over. The Customs Line also provided some very well surveyed stretches of land for building roads and railways — leading to more of the hedge being cut.

There was nothing charming about what the British built. It wasn’t meant to protect anything except imperial revenue. The Inland Customs Line was a bureaucratic barrier that the British created to impose a high salt tax on the people living on one side of the line—the relatively salt-less one.

The customs line was begun while India was under the control of the East India Company but continued into the period of direct British rule. The line had its beginnings in a series of customs houses that were established in Bengal in 1803 to prevent the smuggling of salt to avoid the tax. These customs houses were eventually formed into a continuous barrier that was brought under the control of the Inland Customs Department in 1843.

When the Inland Customs Line was first conceived, British India was governed by the East India Company.  By 1780 Warren Hastings, the Company's Governor-General of India, had brought all salt manufacture in the Bengal Presidency under Company control. This allowed him to increase the ancient salt tax in Bengal from 0.3 rupees per maund (37 kg) to 3.25 rupees per maund by 1788, a rate that it remained at until 1879. This brought in a huge amount of revenue for the company, amounting to 6,257,470 rupees for the 1784–85 financial year, at the cost of the Indian consumer, who would have to expend around two rupees per year (two months' income for a labourer to provide salt for his family. There were taxes on salt in the other British India territories but the tax in Bengal was the highest, with the other taxes at less than a third of the Bengal tax rate.

The Customs Line was longer than the hedge ever was—2,500 miles, from Punjab in the northwest, snaking down to Madhya Pradesh, just south of the city of Burhanpur on the Tapti River. Sometime in the 1840s, British officers started fortifying this administrative line with thorny material to block smugglers from crossing the line and ducking the patrols.

Allan Octavian Hume, familiar to us as the person who founded the Indian National Congress, played an integral part in creating a barrier out of the Inland Customs Line. The British had grappled with the problem of scarcity of suitable stone to build walls along significant stretches of the line. Hume came up with an ingenious solution — build a wall of thorny shrubs. And so shrubs of babool, prickly pear and karaunda were planted to create a hedge ten feet tall and several feet wide. It was thought to be sufficient deterrent to any smuggler or vagabond wanting to go across. The hedge was especially thick in the thickly populated Punjab and the Ganga- Jamuna doab regions.

Both green and dried shrubs were used. Where the hedge suddenly encountered rock, the British Commissioner of the day built small stone walls. Says a work called Finances and Public Works of India, 1869 to 1881 — the Inland Customs Line was at one time manned by twelve thousand men and cost the government nearly two lakh rupees to maintain. This was later reduced to eight thousand men, but the importance of the customs line remained as before. 

So why go through all this trouble? The fact was that salt, as an essential commodity, was considered by the British to be a ready source of tax. By 1858, taxes on salt formed 10 per cent of the East India Company’s revenue. The British controlled some parts of the country, where they imposed a tax on salt as they saw fit. By the Salt Act, they also monopolised the production of salt in British governed parts.

British taxes were high, and unlike the irregular taxes of before, were judiciously collected. To circumvent this, people bought salt elsewhere and transported it into Bengal and Madras Presidencies. Here, they could escape the high British taxes and by flooding the British-ruled areas with salt manufactured elsewhere, perhaps bring down its price. Hence to prevent this, the Commissioner for Customs — GH Smith — came up with the idea of an Inland Customs Line in 1843. Initially, limited to areas around Delhi, Agra and Bengal, the line was connected by more customs houses in 1869 in the province of Punjab to create a continuous stretch spanning 2,500 miles. It sought to prevent smuggling of salt, but also prevented the smuggling of drugs such as opium, cannabis, etc.

At first, the hedge was made mostly of dry branches lugged into place and piled high. But that proved a fruitless task, since it had to be replaced year after year. The line was divided into patrolled sections, and in some places the patrols started to plant and cultivate live hedge, with the idea of creating something more easily maintained and permanent.

Growing a live hedge wasn’t easy, though. The British tried using dwarf Indian plum trees, babool trees, prickly pear, thuer, bamboo, and many other local plants. In some arid places the trees just withered and died. Elsewhere, seedlings were swept away in floods. In other spots, the soil simply wasn’t rich enough to support the growth of anything beyond scrub.

But as the British do, they kept working at it. They dug ditches and brought in better soil. They built embankments to resist floods. They experimented until they found the best trees for each of the many climates that the hedge passed through. Eventually it grew long and tall and wide.

It was, in the words of Sir John Strachey, a lifelong civil servant in British India cited in Moxham’s book, “a monstrous system,” that had few parallels “in any tolerably civilised country.” Each mile required 250 tons of thorny brushwood and other organic material to create, and in one year the patrols might carry 100,000 tons of this plant matter to shore up stretches of dry hedge. In most places, the barrier was at least 10 feet tall and 6 feet thick, but it grew bigger in some areas. It became “a standing monument of the industry of our officers and men and an impervious barrier to smugglers,” another commissioner wrote.

But there were problems. White ants infested the hedge and could bring whole sections down. Bush fires incinerated miles at a time. Storms and whirlwinds could sweep parts of it away. Locusts invaded. Parasitic vines blighted the hedge, the trees died of natural causes. One section had rats living in it, and the patrol there introduced feral cats to combat them.

For all that work, the hedge, like most fortified borders, was only partially successful at stopping smugglers. There were gaps where no one could get plants to grow. Smugglers used the trees themselves as ladders. Sometimes they flung sacks of salt over the top to collaborators on the other side. The maintenance the hedge and enforcement of the line were constant struggles.

The line was gradually expanded as more territory was brought under British control until it covered a distance of more than 2,500 miles (4,000 km), often running alongside rivers and other natural barriers eventually evolved into a living hedge that grew up to 12 feet (3.7 m) high and was compared to the Great Wall of China. The Inland Customs Department employed customs officers, jemadars and men to patrol the line and apprehend smugglers, reaching a peak of more than 14,000 staff in 1872. The line and hedge were considered to be an infringement on the freedom of Indians and in opposition to free trade policies and were eventually abandoned in 1879 when the tax was applied at point of manufacture. The salt tax itself would remain in place until 1946.

It was possible to avoid paying the salt tax by extracting salt illegally in salt pans, stealing it from warehouses or smuggling salt from the princely states which remained outside of direct British rule. The latter was the greatest threat to the company's salt revenues. Much of the smuggled salt came into Bengal from the west and the company decided to act to prevent this trade. In 1803 a series of customs houses and barriers were constructed across major roads and rivers in Bengal to collect the tax on traded salt as well as duties on tobacco and other imports. These customs houses were backed up by "preventative customs houses" located near salt works and the coast in Bengal to collect the tax at source.

These customs houses alone did little to prevent the mass avoidance of the salt tax. This was due to the lack of a continuous barrier, corruption within the customs staff and the westward expansion of Bengal towards salt-rich states. In 1823 the Commissioner of Customs for Agra, George Saunders, installed a line of customs posts along the Ganges and Yamuna rivers from Mirzapur to Allahabad that would eventually evolve into the Inland Customs Line. The main aim was to prevent salt from being smuggled from the south and west but there was also a secondary line running from Allahabad to Nepal to prevent smuggling from the Northwest frontier. The annexation of Sindh and the Punjab allowed the line to be extended north-west by G. H. Smith, who had become Commissioner of Customs in 1834. Smith exempted items such as tobacco and iron from taxation to concentrate on salt and was responsible for expanding and improving the line, increasing its budget to 790,000 rupees per year and the staff to 6,600 men. Under Smith's leadership the line saw many reforms and was officially named the Inland Customs Line in 1843.

Smith's new Inland Customs Line was first concentrated between Agra and Delhi and consisted of a series of customs posts at one mile intervals, linked by a raised path with gateways (known as "chowkis") to allow people to cross the line every four miles. Policing of the barrier and surrounding land, to a distance of 10 to 15 miles (16 to 24 km), was the responsibility of the Inland Customs Department, headed by a Commissioner of Inland Customs. The department staffed each post with an Indian Jemadar (approximately equivalent to a British Warrant Officer) and ten men, backed up by patrols operating 2–3 miles behind the line. The line was mainly concerned with the collection of the salt tax but also collected tax on sugar exported from Bengal and functioned as a deterrent against opium, bhang and cannabis smuggling.

These Jemadars known as ‘Namak ke Daroga’ have been immortalized by Prem Chand in his story of the same name. Readers of those stories would remember the atrocities of these Darogas, but may have thought of it as fiction. But sadly, all of it is true.

This situation lasted until 1858 when the colony was transferred to the Crown following the events of the Indian Rebellion of 1857. The end of company rule allowed the British government to expand Bengal through territorial acquisitions, updating the line as needed. In 1869 the government in Calcutta ordered the connection of sections of the line into a continuous customs barrier stretching 2,504 miles (4,030 km) from the Himalayas to Orissa, near the Bay of Bengal. This distance was said to be the equivalent of London to Constantinople. The north section from Tarbela to Multan was lightly guarded with posts spread further apart as the wide Indus River was judged to provide a sufficient barrier to smuggling. The more heavily guarded section was around 1,429 miles (2,300 km) long and began at Multan, running along the rivers Sutlej and Yamuna before terminating south of Burhanpur. The final 794-mile (1,278 km) section reverted to longer distances between customs posts and ran east to Sonapur.

In the 1869–70 financial year the line collected 12.5 million rupees in salt tax and 1 million rupees in sugar duties at a cost of 1.62 million rupees in maintenance. In this period the line employed around 12,000 men and maintained 1,727 customs posts. By 1877 the salt tax was worth £6.3 million (approx 29.1 million rupees) to the British government in India, with the majority being collected in the Madras and Bengal provinces, lying on either side of the customs line.

In 1878, W.S. Halsey, Commissioner of Inland Customs, reported on the state of British India’s giant hedge. The hedge had grown to more than 1,100 miles long, he wrote, long enough to stretch from Berlin to Moscow. More than half of the barrier, Halsey reported, was made up of “perfect and good green hedge” or “combined green and dry hedge.” In parts, it was 12 feet tall and 14 feet across.

The British Empire had been working on this giant hedge for at least 30 years. It had, at long last, reached “its greatest extent and perfection,” wrote Roy Moxham in The Great Hedge of India. It was an impressive monument to British power and doggedness. One British official wrote that it “could be compared to nothing else in the world except the Great Wall of China.”

As he reported on the extent and health of the hedge, though, Halsey knew its time was coming to an end. That same year, the empire stopped all funding for the mad project, and it was not long before the hedge had disappeared entirely.

When the hedge was abandoned in 1879, it was unmourned.

But the Inland Customs Line created more problems than it solved. The customs line made trade and communication difficult and inordinately delayed goods from reaching their destination. To top it off, it did not entirely serve its purpose of preventing smuggling. A little bit of baksheesh at the police posts did the trick, if pushing camels across the barrier or throwing parcels over it did not! Instead of investing in this physical barrier, under Lord Lytton, the British focused on equalising duties on salt throughout the country and finally on April 1, 1879, the Inland Customs Line was abolished. The salt tax was imposed at the point of manufacture and not on individual traders. Salt would remain a taxable commodity till independence and spur Gandhiji’s Dandi march. There was in fact a Department of Salt Revenue, which continued to police the Punjab parts of the Inland Customs Line right up to 1895. This was primarily to prevent smuggling of rock salt via Kohat, a town now in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa of Pakistan. To Hume also goes the credit of negotiating treaties with various princely states, thus forming a uniform regime, which led to the ultimate abolition of the Customs Line.

So where is this hedge today? Sadly, almost no traces remain of this barrier that once stretched across India and which the famous historian Grant Duff compared to the Great Wall of China. In many places, farmers simply cut away the shrubs to increase their farmland, in others, the shrubs simply withered away.