The Great Hedge

For most of India's recorded history, salt has been both abundant and subject to taxation. This continued to be the case after the British East India Company's arrival in India, and eventually led to the cultivation of a hedge to prevent salt smuggling.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from house
works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Tracy Vie Wilson and I'm Holly Frying way back in
April of It's not so way back, but when you

(00:24):
consider that you and I came onto the show in
March of it feels like forever. It does. Uh. We
did an episode on Australia's rabbit proof fence, so essentially
the English had introduced rabbits to Australia and that rabbits
had done what they do, and this led to the
State Barrier Fence of Western Australia, which was more than

(00:46):
a thousand miles long and was this desperate attempt to
keep rabbits from completely destroying any available agricultural land, and
this fence still exists in some places today. Also led
to a listener request from Christopher to talk about India's
Great Hedge, which was another British effort to build a

(01:08):
massive fence. But in this case, while it's intent was
not to keep people from moving from one place to another,
it definitely had that effect. Its actual purpose was about
collecting taxes. So first we're going to talk about salt
which may sound weird if you don't know what we're
talking about today, but I promise it comes around to

(01:30):
stick with us. Uh. As much as modern medical science
likes to tell you that salt is bad for you,
too much is but salt is necessary to human survival.
Your body actually needs it to function, and it is
a critical part of a lot of food preservation methods.
And even though it's not just about making things taste better,
I know, I'm a big fan of it. It makes

(01:51):
things taste better yep. In India specifically, salt is an
especially critical dietary staple. The climate and a lot of
India is very hot, and that means that people routinely
need to replenish the salt in their bodies as they
sweat it out of their bodies. This hot climate also
makes India home to a number of diseases that cause diarrhea,

(02:13):
and that also means that people need more salt. They
have to replenish the salt in their body as they
rehydrate after having had diarrhea. So everyone needs salt to survive,
and this is especially true in India. For most of
India's recorded history, salt has been both abundant and subject
to taxation. People have collected salt from the ocean, salt lakes,

(02:36):
and the soil, and methods of taxing the collected salt
have varied from place to place and from ruler to ruler.
Throughout India's history, salt taxation has taken the form of
a tax on the sale of salt, a permitting fee
for gathering your own salt, and the variety of other methods.
This idea of taxing salt continued to be present after

(02:58):
the British East India Companies are rival in India. The
company's first ships arrived in India in sixteen o eight,
and over the next two centuries, the company annexed more
and more Indian territory and then ruled it on Britain's behalf.
During all of this time, it continued to collect taxes
on salt. In eighteen fifty seven, the Indian army rebelled

(03:21):
against British troops, which could be a whole different episode. Afterward,
Britain began ruling India directly rather than going through the
East India Company, and when it did, it also maintained
salt taxes. Because the salt was one of the two
primary sources of revenue for the British and India. The
other was a tax on land. The British government paid

(03:43):
close attention to who was getting salt and from where.
Parts of India that lay near the ocean, like Madras
and Bombay, could get salt from seawater. Farther inland, people
could get salt from washing the soil, although this salt
wasn't very pure or very good quality for that matter.
The northwest India lay several princely states that were not

(04:03):
completely under British control. Nearby parts of India could trade
with them for salt. But the British ideal, since salt
was such an important part of its revenue, was for
all of India to get all of its salt from
Britain or from salt that was produced in India that
uh in productions that were actually controlled by the British,

(04:25):
and then that way all of the salt in India
would be subjects to British tax. Consequently, salt, which everyone
truly needed, was expensive under British rule. Personal salt collection
was outlawed, and people weren't always able to get as
much as they needed through the official channels. Sometimes this
was because the government underestimated the allotment of salt each

(04:46):
family should be entitled to. Sometimes it was because the
government controlled supply ran out. Sometimes it was because the
tax just made this necessary nutrient too expensive and costly
for people to be able to afford MHM. Even within
British documents, opinions really varied in terms of how widespread
these problems were and how serious. There were British reports

(05:10):
saying that the number of salt shortages was near disastrous,
and then there were others saying that it was a
challenge but not insurmountable. Regardless of how the British felt
about it, the Indian population definitely objected to the salt tax.
For many, the tax made salt too expensive to afford.
As we mentioned just a moment ago, the tax itself

(05:32):
was also a reminder of British colonial rule, and the
various methods for enforcement of the tax and the terrence
of smuggling were embarrassing and they landed people in jail. Consequently,
protest of salt taxation was a critical part of Indian
of the Indian independence movement and of Gandhi's work there,
and people were willing to or forced to get their

(05:53):
salt from illegal means. There's a whole episode on Gandhi's
Salt March from Way Way, way way back, and I
think the Candice and Jane era of the podcast you're
interested in that. And before we talk a little more
specifically about how Britain tried to stop salt smuggling during
its colonial rule of India, take a quick break for

(06:17):
a word from a sponsor that sounds grand. So to
return to the ways that Britain tried to stop salt smuggling.
Because the salt tax was such a huge source of
revenue for the British, the government really had a vested
interest in stopping people from smuggling salt, and for the
most part, the smuggling was from the princely states in

(06:38):
the Northwest, which were outside of British control, into the
rest of India. In eighteen oh three, a law was
passed to allow the establishment of a customs house in
every district in the Bengal Presidency, which was one of
Britain's major provinces in India. The customs houses had two
jobs to do, to stop smugglers and collect taxes on

(07:01):
imports and exports, and it wasn't just salt. There were
also taxes and duties on things like sugar and tobacco.
Britain built customs barriers on all of the Bengal presidencies
major roads, primarily putting them near salt mines and near
any place where salt might be illegally manufactured, and this
included places where the soil was very salty and places

(07:24):
that had easier access to the sea. Unsurprisingly, the department
in charge of all this monitoring quickly became quite corrupt.
For the most part, the people in charge of the
outposts were British and the rest of the workers were Indian.
All of them were rewarded with thirty five percent of
the value of any salt they confiscated. While this may

(07:45):
have been intended to encourage thoroughness, in reality, the lowest
ranking customs officers didn't actually make enough to live off
of just from their wages, so abusing the thirty percent
reward plan encouraged people to dishonesty. There was also an
ingrained culture of bribery and extortion in this department, and

(08:06):
some of the most nefarious customs workers did send pretty
deliberate things to try to get that thirty bonus, pretty
often things like throwing salt into people's houses and then
accusing them of having stolen it, and then confiscating all
of the salt that they did have, as well as

(08:26):
any vessels that they could have been using to smuggle salt.
But generally we're just using to do things like store
their food. This whole system of customs houses gave the
British many places from which to seek out smugglers and
collect taxes. But since patrolling officers couldn't be everywhere at once,
smuggling was still rampant, and so in eighteen three George Saunders,

(08:49):
the Customs Commissioner, proposed another line of customs outposts, this
time along the Yamuna River, and it was these outposts
that wound up forming the backboat of what would become
the Great Customs Line. So the British Customs Line took
on a lot of different forms over the years. The
British would move branches of it, start new ones, abandoned

(09:11):
parts of it, and otherwise fiddle with it for a
round fifty years or so. Generally speaking, it separated the
Bengal presidency from the princely states and their non British
controlled salt stockpiles by following the Ganges and Yamuna rivers,
then grow then going cross country towards Delhi. In addition,

(09:31):
the salt tax itself was higher in some parts of
British territory and lower in others, and so the Customs
Line had additional guards and customs houses around the places
with the lower tax to try to keep people from
smuggling salt out of the low tax areas and into
the higher tax areas. There was also an independent princely

(09:51):
state within the Customs lines borders for many years, and
so that had its own helping of customs outposts and
surveillance until eventually annexed it as well. Because Britain was
continually annexing new territory, it kept building new customs houses.
A man named G. H. Smith became Britain's Commissioner of

(10:13):
Customs in India in eighteen thirty four. He gradually took
over the whole of the Customs Line and started consolidating
all of its various spurs and duplications that had come
about from these annexations into one unified line. He also
focused on its mission a little bit, dropping some of
the less lucrative levies on things like shawls and tobacco

(10:33):
and instead really going after salt. It was also during
Smith's time as Commissioner that the Customs Line grew into
an actual physical barrier. To start with, there were basically
customs posts every mile, and they were connected by a
raised path. Officers were stationed at every post, and there

(10:54):
were men in addition to that every quarter of a mile,
and these men patrolled their section of the line and
tried to apprehend any smugglers who crossed it. When it
was time to change shifts, guards had to sweep their
section of the path with bamboo or grass so that
the next guard could be responsible for any footprints that
crossed it on their shift. Somewhere around eighteen forty the

(11:17):
British started using vegetation as a barrier, and that practice
was becoming more widespread by the eighteen fifties. In Smith's
time as Commissioner of Customs, which lasted for twenty years,
the Customs Line budget swelled to seven hundred ninety thousand
rupees a year and its staff grew to six thousand,

(11:38):
six hundred people. The next Commissioner of Customs was Allen
Octavian Hume. According to his reports, by eighteen sixty eight
there was a stretch of impenetrable hedge along the customs
line that was about a hundred and eighty miles long,
and maintaining this barrier took a huge amount of time
and labor. Thanks to storms, fires, termites, normal decay, and vandalism,

(12:03):
about half the vegetation had to be replaced every single
year through the late eighteen sixties and until the end
of his tenure in eighteen seventy. Commissioner Hume's annual reports
detailed the line's growth as the hedge extended into this
hundreds of miles long barrier that was at least ten
feet tall and two feet thick. Soon the British government

(12:27):
created an entire inland Customs department. This department was enormous
in terms of both money and power. Between eighteen sixty
nine and eighteen seventy, the cost to run the customs
line was about one point six million rupees, but in
the same time, the customs line collected twelve point five
million rupees in tax just on salt. It continued to

(12:49):
collect taxes on other necessities such as sugar as well,
so it cost some money to maintain, but they were
making a whole lot more money in the taxes they
were collecting from it. Commissioner G. A. Jim Batton took
over as Commissioner in eighteen seventy, and he focused mainly
on making the existing line completely impassable and also lengthening it.

(13:10):
Here is a description in the words of Sir John
and Lieutenant General Richard Strakey, of what the customs line
and its heads were like at its peak from the
Finances and Public Works of India from eighteen sixty nine
to eighteen eighty one parenth Season eighty two. So this
is the quote. A customs line was established which stretched
across the whole of India, which in eighteen sixty nine

(13:33):
extended from the Indus to the Mahanadi in Madras, a
distance of two thousand, three hundred miles, and it was
guarded by nearly twelve thousand men and petty officers. The fine,
the Commissioner of Inland Customs wrote in his report for
eighteen sixty nine eighteen seventy, is divided into one D
ten beats, each presided over by a patrol and watched

(13:54):
from one thousand, seven hundred and twenty seven guard posts.
A very perfect system of patrolling exists, and except in
some wild portions of the central provinces where tigers bar
the way alike to smuggler and customs officer after dark,
goes on with unabated vigilance night and day. The workers

(14:14):
who patrolled this line were exclusively men, and they had
to live along the line in dwellings that they themselves
were responsible for building, and they also had to leave
their families behind the most ideal parts of the hedge
were ten to fourteen feet high six to twelve ft
six impenetrable live vegetation, including acacia, prickly pair, indian plum,

(14:37):
and a thorny creeper growing through it. At its longest,
it was two thousand, five hundred and four miles long.
The last commissioner to oversee the customs line was W. S. Halsey.
He reported that eighteen seventy seven. In eighteen seventy eight,
the hedge contained four hundred eleven point five miles of

(14:59):
perfect and good green hedge, two miles of combined green
and dry hedge, four hundred seventy one miles of dry hedge,
six miles of stone wall, and three hundred thirty three
miles that were quote wanting or insufficient for a total
of a one thousand, five hundred twenty one miles at
that time. So this was as it was sort of

(15:21):
waning at the very end of its time and use.
The same report also mentions that additional work on the
line was ending since it was about to be abandoned.
So before we jumped into the next segment, which is
kind of going to talk about the impact of this hedgeline,
do you want to have a word from a sponsor.
Let's do so to get back to the impact of

(15:42):
this customs line. The Streaky's whose report on Finances and
Public Works we read from earlier, we're pretty upfront in
their opinions about the impact of this hedge. They wrote,
quote it may be easily imagined what great and inevitable
obstruction to trade, what gross abuses and oppression, what annoyance

(16:03):
and harassment individuals took place? The interference was not combined
to the traffic passing into British Territory. For owing to
the levy of an export duty on all sugar passing
from Bridgish British Territory and to raj Patana which had
been retained after all other similar inland duties were removed,

(16:23):
and to which I shall again refer, the same obstructions
were offered to the traffic passing in the other direction.
They also noted that it was impossible to operate without it,
given that the salt tax was levied differently in different provinces.
So from their point of view, it was an evil,
but a necessary one. Yeah. I didn't find in their

(16:45):
report what their thoughts really were on the tax itself,
but they were sort of like, yes, as long as
this is how the tax is working, we have to
do something. People who lived really close to the customs lie, one,
we're allowed to take two pounds of salt across it
without paying taxes. But they still had to be searched, which,

(17:06):
in addition to just being an indignity, opened up the
possibility for extortion and bribery if they were falsely accused
of smuggling something. People who tried to smuggle salt across
the line, and we're caught, we're fined or imprisoned. In
eighteen sixty eight alone, nine hundred and twenty four smugglers
were fine, and one thousand, four hundred sixteen were imprisoned.

(17:28):
The fine for smuggling was also more than double the
average agricultural wage, so it was a huge deal. People
tried a lot of different ways to try to smuggle
salt over the line. One was to float salt down
the river on an unmanned barge so that it would
be collected farther down the river away from the customs hedge.

(17:51):
People would also like plant a pole into the ground
and then shinny up it and sort of jump over
from the top, and the hope of not getting caught
on all the thorns um that would leave the evidence
of the post behind them on the other side, so
that someone would know that someone had gotten across. People
would also disguise salt and dried fruit or other food items.

(18:14):
But in spite of all these justifications that the British
gave for needing the line, and for all the expensive
running in and all the headaches and delays that it
added onto basic trade and commerce operations in India, the
reality was that it was still really expensive. So right
about the same time as Britain completed this giant barrier
that basically walled off the princely states of Rajasthan from

(18:37):
the Bengal presidency, it put its eye to different to
a different way to maintain its tax on salt, a
total monopoly on salt production in all of India, including
the princely states that were out of its control. First,
it bribed the rulers of Jaipur and Jodpur for the
control of the Sambar salt lake, and this was a
major supplier of salt both legal and illegal, to British

(18:59):
India from outside of the customs line. The British lease
on the Sambar salt works went into effect on May first,
eighteen seventy one. Ao Hume, who we previously talked about
during this uh, during his term as Customs Commissioner, negotiated
with the Princely States of Rajasthan in eighteen seventy eight,
basically securing British rights to smaller sources of salt around

(19:22):
the princely states. The British paid the leaders of the
princely states almost two point three million rupees for control
of nearly all of the remaining salt production, meaning that
even though the princely states were not British territory, their
residents still had to pay the British salt tanks. The
Customs Line and its accompanying hedge were abandoned on April one,

(19:44):
eighteen seventy nine. At this point, the British had gained
near total control of all salt production in all of India,
including both the territory it had annexed and the princely
states which are we're not really under its jurisdiction. Following
a famine that had started three years before, Britain had
also kind of rebalanced the taxation levels so that they

(20:06):
were more consistent from one place to another. The actual
goal of this was to reduce taxes in the areas
that were hardest hit by the famine and increased in
other areas to make up for the difference. So it
just had the overall side effect of meaning that the
tax was mostly the same everywhere, and it was no
longer financially worthwhile to have a big smuggling operation from

(20:29):
a low tax area because the taxes wasn't that much
lower anymore. So the people of India were relieved of
a major trade obstacle and the searches, seizures, extortion, etcetera
that came with it of the Customs Line, but they
were still faced with paying an oft an unaffordable amount
for a basic dietary staple that they literally had to

(20:50):
have to survive, whether they were actual subjects of British
rule or not. So. Protesting the salt tax was a
huge part of the Indian into Dance movement. The tax
was repealed in nineteen forty six, and India gained its
independence from Britain in nineteen forty seven. The independence movement
and the all the events that went along with it

(21:11):
could definitely be entire other podcasts, And as we said earlier,
there is one about the Salt March back in the archive.
Roy Moxham, who wrote The Great Hedge of India The
Search for the Living Barrier That Divided a People, which
was one of the main sources for this episode, looked
for remaining evidence of the Hedge during several trips to
India during the nineteen nineties. This actually started after he

(21:33):
stumbled over a reference to it in a used book
that he had purchased on a whim. Even after finding
old maps showing the customs line, he still had trouble
finding any actual remnants of it on his subsequent visits
to India. Yeah, the book itself is part history of India,
history of this hedge, history of the salt tax, and
part travel log of his efforts to find an actual

(21:57):
remnant of it. I mean, since it was made of vegetation,
once it was not maintained anymore, it mostly disappeared. It was,
you know, the dry parts eaten or destroyed or burned up,
and the living parts kind of growing into something that
wasn't an orderly hedge anymore. Um, his search probably would
have been a lot easier today. GPS receivers weren't ubiquitous

(22:21):
when he was doing this. You know, you just you
just didn't have one in your smartphone that you carried
around with you. So we had to buy one. It
cost a hundred and twenty five pounds at the time. Um.
The printers and scanners and digital cameras that could have
helped him wrangle all these old maps also were not
nearly as ubiquitous as they are today. So he made
several trips to India, and not not all of them

(22:43):
specifically to look for the hedge. But it took him
a lot of tries and a lot of poking through
some more remote areas before he did find what he
felt like was a last remaining vegetation part of the hedge.
It's a really interesting book. Um, and we have talked
almost none about his travels into India and all of

(23:06):
his efforts to do that part, because it's not so
much about the history part. But if you're interested in
the story, that's all through there. Do you also have
some listener mail for us? Now that we are thinking
about salt and lunch, I do I feel guilty that
the whole time we talk about salt, I think about food.
That's okay. This is actually from our Facebook in box,

(23:29):
and it's from Anna. Anna says is the North American archaeologist.
I was very excited to see the episode on Poverty Point.
Many Americans have an unfortunate lack of knowledge about Native
American history, which contributes to the numerous misconceptions and stereotypes
about the many very groups that lived or still live
in North America. I've had students asked if pre contact

(23:52):
Native Americans had weapons, and many even believe that Native
Americans are extinct. I'd love to hear more about the
worries of pre or post contact Native groups. I'm one
of those rare people who does not care so much
for the biographical episode, so thank you for including episodes
about events or culture groups as well. Sadly, I never
had the opportunity to dig either at Poverty Point or Kahokia,

(24:16):
but I did excavate at the buried Gardens of Campsville site,
which is contemporaneous with Kahokia and situated about seventy miles
north of the city. Well within Kahki is extensive trading network.
I thought you might enjoy my favorite story about this
trading network. Archaeologistic ka Hokia have actually found shark teeth
traded all the way from the Gulf Coast. That's pretty cool,

(24:37):
But what fascinates me is that replica shark teeth made
out of stone have also been recovered. The wealthy elite
could afford the real teeth, but the next sociological stratum,
in order to appear wealthy or fitting with the trend
of having these teeth as adornment or display, had to
make do with a stone knockoff. Just goes to show
that people are pretty much the same everywhere, even thousands

(24:58):
of years ago. I love you for the show. Thanks
for all you do. Anna. PS. Thank you for using
the term projectile point instead of Arrowhead. Thank you Anna
for writing that letter. I love the part about the
shark teeth. I did too. I like that we're doing
designer impostors, yes, even historically well. And I also like

(25:20):
how it shows a different culturally between Kahokia and Poverty Point,
because at poverty Point there's not a lot of evidence
of different social strata um but the shark teeth points
to evidence of their being sort of higher and lower
classes in Khokia, which is really interesting. If you would
like to write to us about this or any other episode,

(25:41):
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(26:01):
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(26:21):
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