After the Great Wall of China, this was the longest wall erected by humans. It was the only one made from vegetation and the only one that grew out of greed. Its sole purpose was filling up the insatiable coffers of the British East India Company, as well as the bottomless pockets of its ravenous shareholders and its rapacious officials.
As the retail price of salt increased, it became an attractive item for smuggling
Most of the material for this article is derived from The Great Hedge of India: The Search for the Living barrier that Divided a People, the 2001 book by Roy Moxham, and Essays, written in 1911 by Henry Francis Pelham, F. Haverfield.
One of the most rapacious taxes instituted by the East India Company, first in Bengal and then across the Indian Subcontinent, as the Company’s holding expanded, was the Salt Tax; the tax on the manufacture, transit, trade and sale of salt.
The techniques of extracting salt from subterranean mines were invented in the mid-19th century, as were the railways that could carry the massive loads of rock salt across large distances. Sea salt, therefore, constituted nearly 80% of the total commodity consumed. However, it, too, had to be transported from the coastal regions to the interior of the country on bullock carts or draft animals.
Salt, like other food items, has always been taxed but only lightly. During much of the Mughal times, it was taxed at a rate of Rs. 0.3 per maund. Finding it a secured source of revenue, the Company raised it by a factor of ten to Rs 3.25 per maund by the end of the 18th century.
The consumption of salt per head is about half a teaspoon per day but its use is pervasive. At a modest one kilogram of salt per head per year (at the average intake of about 3 grams per day), it doesn’t appear much – but with a population of about 200 million in 1750, Indians bought five million maunds of salt every year. Moxham estimates that accounting for other uses like food preservation etc, this consumption is about 3 kg per person per year, amounting to a national sale of 15 million maunds. This massive quantity afforded a vast scope to the East India Company for revenue exploitation, which is evident from the multiple regulations it enforced such as the Transport of Salt Act (1879), Indian Salt Act (1882), Madras Salt Act (1884), Bombay Salt Act (1890), Indian Salt Duties Act (1908), Salt Act (1944) and so on.
It is no wonder that the Company made massive profits from the salt monopoly. In the first year of the tax in 1781-82, the salt tax collection was Rs. 2.96 million. The excess revenue came from the pockets of a wretched populace who had already been impoverished by the outright plunder of the state treasury by Lord Clive in 1757, the introduction of a feudal system by Lord Cornwallis through the Permanent Settlement in 1793, the creation of various monopolies by the East India Company and the rapacious privateer trading activities of the Company officials.
As the retail price of salt increased, it became an attractive item for smuggling. Governor General Viscount Wellesley, the elder brother of Waterloo-fame Duke of Wellington, responded by erecting a series of custom houses starting from 1803. As the company came to control more land in northern India, the custom houses were extended. When the mere presence of the custom houses failed to curb smuggling, the Company officials decided to build a physical wall. However, they soon realized that not enough construction material would be available for this venture. They then hit upon this ingenious idea of growing a living wall; a continuous line of thorny trees that was impossible to pass with pack animals or animal carts.
The hedge required a large manpower to patrol its entire length. At its peak, it employed 14,188 men inclusive of officers, petty officers and workers
The alignment of the Custom Line varied over the years but created a north-south divide. The salt producing areas of Orissa on the Bay of Bengal in the west and Gujarat on the Arabian Sea lay to the south of this line while the major population centres of north and central India lay to its north. By the end of the 18th century, the Custom Line followed the River Indus from Attock Bridge to Layyah, then the live hedge as depicted till Burhanpur, and thereafter, following natural barriers to the east through Raipur terminated at Sambalpur on the River Mahanadi, at the border with princely states of Orissa. Adding up the rivers, canals and the living hedge sections, the Inland Customs Line was 4,000 km long.
The living hedge developed slowly. Initially, thorny bushes and tree branches were cut and placed as dead wood along the line. At certain places, these were fixed with stakes to avoid being blown away by strong winds. By 1868, the dead-wood hedge had become a 300 km long impenetrable wall. However, the wood was exposed to insects, decay, fire and wind that required expensive constant repair. Mark Thornhill, a magistrate at Muttra during the War of Independence reported, in his book titled Indian Mutiny, seeing a part of the Custom Hedge between Muttra and Agra being set to fire by the revolting sepoys to enable their movement.
In 1868, Allan Hume was appointed Commissioner of Inland Customs. He proposed the idea of a living hedge and, with typical tenacity of the colonial era British officials, initiated work for the project. He began trials of suitable trees and selected Indian Plum, Karonda, Babol, Lal Patti and Thor. Wells were dug and rain ponds were made along the hedge to water the plants. A good road was constructed along the hedge for patrolling. In 1869 alone, the customs men carried out 29 million km of patrols, dug 2 million cubic feet of earth and carried over 150,000 tons of thorny material for the hedge. It was quite a gigantic task.
Hume was responsible for transforming an irregular and patchy wood line into a formidable living wall. He remarked that his barrier was “in its most perfect form [...] utterly impassable to man or beast.”
The hedge required a large manpower to patrol its entire length. At its peak, it employed 14,188 men inclusive of officers, petty officers and workers. The job on the line was tough and its Indian employees were paid at least Rs.5 per month in 1880s, as against the earning of Rs.3 per month for an agricultural worker. In addition, every employee was allowed to take 2 kg of tax-free salt every month across the line.
Allan Hume came to India in 1849 and served in Etawah, UP, for 18 years till 1867, when he was promoted to be the Commissioner for Inland Customs. It is no wonder then that the only place where Roy Moxham found a remnant of the hedge over a hundred years later was in Etawah. Hume went on to establish the Indian Congress in 1885. He claimed that “I look upon myself as a native Indian” but returned to England in 1894, after 45 years of service in India.
W.S. Hasley, who became Commissioner Inland Customs in 1876, was the last supervisor of the hedge. He decided that the hedge would be abandoned by 1879 because there were more efficient methods of collecting the salt tax. It then slowly withered away due to lack of maintenance.
There have been several critiques of this customs line. Giving evidence to a Parliamentary Select Committee of 1836, Dr. John Crawfurd of the Bengal Medical Service stated, “I estimate that the cost of salt to the rural labourer [...] as being equal to about two months’ wages, i.e., 1/6th of the whole annual earnings.” Sir John Strachey, the financial minister in Governor General’s council, who abolished the Custom Line, said of the line in 1893, “A monstrous system, to which it would be almost impossible to find a parallel in any tolerably civilised country.” Journalist Madeleine Bunting wrote in The Guardian in February 2001 that the line was “one of the most grotesque […] achievements of the British in India.” Commenting on the Moxham’s book, the Boston Globe wrote that this hedge was a monument to one of the great injustices of Victorian imperialism.
The monopoly on the manufacture of salt and its tax continued till the end of colonial rule. In 1930, Gandhi found it an ideal issue to be used to shame the British. He led his now famous Salt March in which he, along with thousands of his followers, was arrested. The movement had its desired effect and the Subcontinent won its freedom barely seventeen years later.
The salt tax remained in force until March 1947, when it was abolished by Liaquat Ali Khan, the Finance Minister in the Interim Government of India headed by Jawaharlal Nehru.
Parvez Mahmood retired as a Group Captain from PAF and is now a software engineer. He lives in Islamabad and writes on social and historical issues. He can be reached at parvezmahmood53@gmail.com