The hunting of the shaug

Charles Allen

THE GREAT HEDGE OF INDIA by Roy Moxham Constable, f14.99, pp. 207 This is the intriguing story of what is known in India as a shauq — an obsession or magnificent folly. Five years ago Roy Moxham, a conservator at the University of London Library, was browsing in a secondhand bookshop on the Charing Cross Road when he came across a copy of General Sleeman' s Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official, a late edition published in 1893. An editor's footnote caught Moxham's eye and a shauq was born.

The author of the footnote was Sir John Strachey, father of Lytton Strachey, who had written (or so we are told):

To secure the levy of a duty on salt. . . there grew up gradually a monstrous system, to which it would be almost impossible to find a parallel in any tolerably civilised country. A Customs line was established which stretched across the whole of India, which in 1869 extended from the Indus to the Mahanadi in Madras, a distance of 2,300 miles.

This customs line consisted 'principally of an immense impenetrable hedge of thorny trees and bushes'. Moxham was astonished. He had never heard of such a massive hedge; nor, to his knowledge, had anybody else. The issue of the salt tax had been a highly charged one in British India — think of Gandhi and his famous salt march to Dandi in 1930 — and it seemed to him unthinkable that this 'monstrous system' could be so quickly forgotten. So Moxham set out to rediscover the Great Hedge.

Moxham's tales of his often fruitless trawls through the shelves of the old India Office and the map drawers of the Royal Geographical Society, followed by his equally fruitless forays into the heart of the Indian countryside in search of the Great Hedge, ought by rights to be deeply boring, particularly since at the end of the day his labours achieve very little. Yet it is impossible to follow this bizarre quest without being utterly charmed by the author's wideeyed innocence. Here is the Don Quixote de nos fours, waxing hugely wrathful about the iniquities of the British in India, taking equally in his stride the unexpected acquisition of a shackled prisoner in a railway carriage or being bounced across the Indian countryside perched on a seed-drill, expressing joy at finding a raised embankment in the middle of nowhere which a kindly local declares to be the remains of the Great Hedge: `To others it might not have been impressive, but to me it was the end of a long and arduous search.'

A hugely enjoyable book, then — but also a most perverse one, for in his entirely laudable enthusiasm for his shawl Moxham has constructed an economic history of British India that comes perilously close to being a work of fiction.

Moxham has gone to great pains to demonstrate that his Great Hedge — more correctly, the customs line that separated British Bengal from the Princely States — was not simply a customs barrier but a sort of early try-out of the Berlin Wall; the chief instrument of a 'totally inhumane' revenue system based on a most cruel tax — specifically, a salt tax levied by uncaring rulers intent on squeezing every rupee out of the poorest of the poor. He sets the scene for us by dwelling on the East India Company's rapacious government of Bengal in the days of Robert Clive, which he seems to regard as peculiarly British behaviour rather than something picked up and improved upon and, rather more disconcertingly, as setting the standard for future British economic policy in India. The Nabob era is quite shameful enough without Moxham needing to egg the pudding further by informing us, for example, that in the devastating famine of 1769-70 'at least ten million died' in Bengal (out of a population most historians put at about seven million), largely due to the East India Company's 'looting of Bengal'. Nothing to do with the failure of two successive harvests throughout Hindustan, then. If Mr Moxham cares to visit Patna he will see there the vast beehive-shaped granary built in the wake of the famine, part of a series of measures intended to ensure that the Government of Bengal would never again be caught on the hop.

From the Bengal of the Nabobs we are whisked forward to the British Raj of a century later, with not so much as a hint from the author that attitudes and policies may have altered just a bit over the intervening years. By now a formidable customs barrier had been erected along Bengal's western border so that a tax on salt imported from the Princely States in Rajputana could be levied at the very high rate of between three and four rupees per maund (82 pounds weight). Why so? 'The government's revenues (from land) stagnated,' writes Moxham, by way of explanation. 'Consequently. Bengal had to find other sources of taxation. It chose salt.' Not exactly. What Moxham does not trouble to tell us is that by the mid-1830s a vast programme of reform was under way, and it had also become clear that one method of revenue collection was not working the taxation of a range of commodities in transit (again, the British were following the Indian model). Recognising what a later Governor-General would describe as a system so full of irregularities and anomalies, and complicated, that it would be in vain to enquire from what objections or what abuses they were free', the Government of India decided to 'abolish them and substitute for them higher rates for duty upon salt'. In 1836 — in the sort of tax simplification scheme that every Chancellor of the Exchequer dreams of but which in practice rarely works — all duties on goods being brought into British India were replaced by a single, higher duty on salt. Moxham makes a meal of the imposition of the latter — but why spoil a good story by mentioning the accompanying abolition of the other duties?

This is when Moxham's Great Hedge first began to take shape. Much of Bengal's salt had to be imported from the salt lake of Sambhar in the Princely State of Jaipur. The dramatic tax hike on salt after 1836 now made it a highly profitable commodity for smugglers who could easily evade the customs posts on the Rajputana-Bengal border. The only solution that the British authorities could come up with was to build a barrier — a mix of natural obstacles, stone walling, dry hedging of piled up thorn bush and, yes, planted green hedging (which element, incidentally, never totalled more than 411.50 miles, or 709.65 miles when combined with dry hedging).

It took some 30 years and an army of workers to get all this up and running, but long before the customs line had grown into an effective barrier it had become clear to the Government of India that the salt tax was unjust, that it was, in the words of Lord Lytton, 'one of the greatest opprobria of British rule in India'. A succession of Governors-General from Lord Dalhousie onwards sought its abolition but found their good intentions frustrated, not by procrastinating civil servants but by the difficulties of renegotiating some 30 or so treaties with the Indian Princes whose states bordered British India. Not one word of this do we get from Moxham.

Indeed, it is most odd that in this context Moxham should single out one Indian civil servant, Allan Octavian Hume, as the chief villain of his story. He presents this deeply humane liberal, who in retirement helped to found and steer the Indian National Congress, as a shikar-crazy official bent on making the customs line impenetrable. Can Moxham really have been unaware that it was Hume who, first as Commissioner of Customs and then as Secretary to the Government of India in the Revenue and Agriculture Department, successfully negotiated the treaties and the building of a railway line from Sambhar lake to the Bengal border that allowed the customs barrier to be removed in 1879? One of Hume's biographers speaks of this as his 'principal achievement' as Commissioner for Customs, and it was for this that he received the thanks of the Secretary of State for India — not, as Moxham states, for 'making the Customs Line so effective'.

Finally, a correction to that quote from Sir John Strachey as given in the second paragraph of this review. Since Moxham makes much of these lines to support his argument, it should be pointed out that he has quoted both incorrectly and selectively. The quotation is drawn from the first serious study of the economics of British rule in India — one that is familiar to every serious student of Indian economic history and not, as Moxham implies, some obscure and forgotten tome. The first sentence should read as follows:

To secure the levy of the duty on the salt imported from Rajputana, and, as communications were improved, to prevent the ingress of salt taxed at lower rates into the provinces where it was more highly taxed, preventative measures were necessary....

As the rest of the quotation shows, Strachey was frank in his condemnation of what he calls a 'monstrous system'. And why not, for it was he, along with his master Lord Lytton and his fellow civil-servant Allan Octavian Hume, who finally dismantled both the iniquitous salt tax and the customs line along with it? Being wise political animals, both Lytton and Strachey made a point of deploring what others had done before them while praising what they themselves had put in its place. This did not prevent the latter from adding that, in his opinion, 'a greater or more admirable work was never conceived in any country than that which has been undertaken, and in a great degree accomplished, by Englishmen in India during the last 25 years, and which is still going on'.

It isn't kind to pick holes in someone's first published book, but The Great Hedge of India is being trumpeted by its publishers as a 'genuinely newsworthy rediscovery' and seems set to become a best-seller. In the circumstances, it seems fair to warn readers to take Mr Moxham's story with a pinch of salt.