Why British built the great hedge of India

A traveller 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, karanda 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. At 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. 

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 karanda 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 two thousand five hundred miles. It sought to prevent smuggling of salt, but also prevented the smuggling of drugs such as opium, cannabis, etc. 

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. 

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. An Englishman named 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. Sadly, he found most of the hedge extinct, except for a small patch near Etawah.

The writer is the author of Brahmaputra — Story of Lachit Borphukan and Sahyadris to Hindukush — Maratha Conquest of Lahore and Attock. Views are personal.