For most of the nineteenth century there was a wall running down the middle of India. Not a metaphorical one. A barrier of thorn, in places fourteen feet high and twelve feet thick, grown out of the ground and clipped into shape, with guard posts along it and thousands of men walking its length. At its fullest the customs line it belonged to ran 2,504 miles, roughly 4,030 km, from the Himalayan foothills down to Odisha.
Its purpose was to make sure you paid tax on salt.
It was abandoned in 1879. Then it disappeared so thoroughly that a century later a librarian from London had to make three trips across India to prove to himself that it had ever been real.
A tax on the one thing nobody can skip
India has never been short of salt. It has a long coastline, it has salt lakes, and it has traded the stuff for as long as anyone has records of. The difficulty was never supply. It was that the British administration worked out early that salt is close to a perfect thing to tax, because there is no substitute for it and no way to stop buying it. In a hot country full of people doing physical work outdoors, salt is not a seasoning. It is a requirement, for them and for their animals.
The rates were punishing. In Bengal in 1788 the duty stood at 3.25 rupees per maund, a maund being about 37 kg. For an ordinary family the tax came to something like two rupees a year, which for a labourer was around two months of income, spent on salt alone.
In 1836 a surgeon of the Bengal Medical Service, John Crawfurd, told a parliamentary select committee that the salt duty had been swallowing about a sixth of a rural labourer's annual income, and that at its worst, in 1823, it took close to six months' wages.
You can see what that did in the consumption figures. People living inside the customs line got through roughly 8 pounds of salt a year. People on the other side of it, where salt was cheap, used up to 16 pounds. The barrier was not an abstraction to the households it enclosed. It halved what they could put in their food.
How you grow a wall across a subcontinent
The system started small, in 1803, as a scatter of customs houses and barriers on the roads and rivers of Bengal. Over the following decades the posts multiplied and joined up, and in 1843 the whole apparatus was formally named the Inland Customs Line. By 1869 it was continuous.
A dead barrier across that distance would have been hopeless. Timber and dry thorn get stolen for fuel, rot in the monsoon, and need constant replacing. A living one repairs itself, thickens every year and costs almost nothing to feed. So the customs department started growing it.
From 1867 the work fell to Allan Octavian Hume, who ran trials of indigenous thorny shrubs to see which species would take in which soils and rainfall. The mix that emerged was Indian plum, babool, karonda and several kinds of Euphorbia, with prickly pear where the ground was poor and bamboo in other stretches. Where it worked, it worked completely. Officials described the finished article as impassable to man or beast.
The staffing was on the same scale as the idea. In 1869 the line was manned by 136 officers, 2,499 petty officers and 11,288 men, spread across 1,727 guard posts. By 1872 the establishment peaked at 14,188 people of all ranks. Their working life was to patrol a hedge and search travellers for salt.
What the records actually say about the length
This is the part where the story usually gets stretched, and it is worth slowing down for. Popular accounts describe a hedge of 1,100 miles, or 3,700 km of living barrier. The customs department's own returns are more specific and quite a lot less tidy.
In 1868 there were 180 miles of what the department called thoroughly impenetrable hedge. By 1870 that had grown to 448.75 miles of "perfect" hedge plus another 233.5 miles rated "strong and good". At the line's peak in 1878 there were 411.5 miles of perfect and good live hedge, and a further 1,109.5 miles of inferior hedge, dry hedge or stone wall.
So the famous 1,100 mile figure is real, but it is the measurement for the poor stuff: dead thorn heaped up, and masonry. The living, growing, self repairing wall that makes the story sound impossible never got much beyond 450 miles at its best. Nobody even knows for certain when the first stretch of live hedge was planted. That is still an extraordinary thing to have grown on purpose across northern India, and it is a smaller and more patchwork thing than the legend.
1 April 1879
The line was given up not because anyone thought better of it, but because it stopped paying. Once the government had secured control of salt production inside the princely states, it could level the duty across the country instead of policing a price gap. In the 1879 reform the Bengal rate came down to 2.9 rupees a maund while the rate elsewhere went up to 2.5, and with the difference gone, smuggling was no longer worth the walk.
The timing had a grimmer element too. The Great Famine of 1876 to 1878 killed around 6.5 million people and gutted the revenue the line existed to protect. On 1 April 1879 the Inland Customs Line was abolished.
After that the hedge simply went. Farmers cut it back to recover their fields, and the rest withered or was cleared. A barrier that had taken decades of planting and a workforce of fourteen thousand vanished from the landscape within a generation, and then from the histories.
The man who perfected it, and what he did next
Allan Octavian Hume, the customs commissioner who turned the hedge from an idea into a functioning barrier, did not stay a customs man. He left the civil service in 1882. In 1883 he wrote an open letter to the graduates of Calcutta University urging them to organise politically, and in 1885 the first session of the Indian National Congress met in Bombay. Hume served as its general secretary for its first twenty two years. He was also, separately, a serious enough ornithologist to be called the father of Indian ornithology.
It is a strange pairing to hold in one biography. The official who worked out which thorn bush grew best in which soil, so that the salt tax could be enforced across a continent, later helped assemble the political body that would campaign against the government he had served. Historians argue about his motives for the second act. The first act is not in dispute.
A footnote in a library
In 1995 Roy Moxham, a conservator at a University of London library, was reading Major General Sir William Sleeman's Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official when he came across a footnote quoting John Strachey about a customs hedge. He went looking for more and found almost nothing. A structure of that size should have left a paper trail and a memory, and it had left neither.
So he went to find it. It took three trips to India. He worked from old maps, including an 1876 survey, and walked stretches of countryside asking people whether anything was known about a hedge. Eventually, in Etawah district in Uttar Pradesh, near Pali Ghar, he found a long low embankment that matched. An elderly man who remembered the stories helped him place it, about a mile east of where the old map had put the line.
Moxham published The Great Hedge of India in 2001. It has since been translated into Marathi and Tamil. Most of what general readers know about the customs line traces back to one librarian following a footnote.
The tax outlived the hedge by sixty seven years
Losing the hedge did not mean losing the tax. The duty on salt carried on for another half century and more, and it was still there in 1930 when Gandhi picked it as the target for civil disobedience, precisely because it touched everybody.
He left Sabarmati Ashram on 12 March 1930 with 78 volunteers and walked 387 km to the coast at Dandi. On the morning of 6 April he broke the salt law by lifting a lump of natural salt from the shore. Over sixty thousand people were arrested in the disobedience that followed. The Gandhi-Irwin Pact of March 1931 conceded the right to collect salt for personal use, but the duty itself survived until the Interim Government abolished it in October 1946.
- 1803Scattered customs houses and barriers go up on the roads and rivers of Bengal to collect the salt duty.
- 1843The separate posts are formally unified as the Inland Customs Line.
- 1869The line becomes continuous, running 2,504 miles from the Himalayan foothills to Odisha.
- 1 April 1879Abandoned. The tax is levelled across the country instead, and smuggling stops paying.
- 6 April 1930Gandhi breaks the salt law at Dandi after a 387 km walk. The duty is still in force.
- October 1946The salt duty is finally abolished, 67 years after the hedge was given up.
The hedge is the part of this that sounds invented, and it is the part that disappeared almost without trace. The tax was the ordinary, unglamorous arrangement it was built to protect, and that lasted another sixty seven years after the last thorn was abandoned. It usually goes that way round. The spectacular machinery gets dismantled and forgotten, and the quiet thing it was guarding carries on, until enough people walk to the sea and bend down to pick up a handful of mud.
