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BOOKS
The
Thin Green Line
Eccentric
and English, this adventure story
By
Swapan Dasgupta
Among
the great charms of reading history as a riveting story of the past is
that even a footnote can acquire a life of its own. It is to Roy Moxham's
credit that in The Great Hedge of India he has constructed a fascinating
story out of a small aside in the memoirs of a civil servant. While it
is tempting to view the book as an innovative exercise in historical reconstruction,
it is equally relevant to see it as a significant offering of the great
British eccentric tradition. Simply put, this amazing and forgotten story
of the Great Hedge, which was constructed by the Raj as a tariff line
across more than 1,180 miles of India, could not have been written by
an Indian in India.
 It
required the spirit of adventure, the quirky obsessiveness and doggedness
of an amateur historian in England to create this book. Moxham has shown
the same spirit of selfless enterprise that is evident in a bird watcher,
a railway engine spotter and a participant in Mastermind. His crazy pursuit
of the Great Hedge is not something a professional historian would have
managed, or even attempted.
The reason
is quite obvious. The tale of the Great Hedge will not alter our understanding
of the fiscal policies of either the East India Company or the Crown administration.
The impact of the salt tax on people and profits has already been well
documented.
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The
great hedge of India
By Roy Moxham
Constable
Price: £13.99
Pages: 233
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Moxham doesn't
add to our knowledge in any meaningful way, though he does provide some
interesting details. Like A.O. Hume's report in 1869 stating that the
customs officers "marched and patrolled 350,000 miles, and weighed
over 200,000 tons of goods, and the men walked over 18 million miles,
dug over 2 million cubic feet of earth in connection with trenches and
banks of the new green hedge, collected and carried over 150,000 tons
of thorny material for the dry hedge".
Where Moxham's
book really scores is in telling the story of how he stumbled on the mystery
of the Great Hedge, how he blundered through countless archives and old
maps and finally came across the remnants of the old customs line in an
obscure corner of the Chambal in Madhya Pradesh.
The hedge
itself was a strange piece of botanical architecture. "In its most
perfect form the hedge is a live one," wrote a Commissioner of Inland
Customs in the 1860s, "from 10 to 14 feet in height, and six to 12
feet thick, composed of closely clipped thorny trees and shrubs, amongst
which the babool (acacia catechu), the Indian plum (zizyphues jujuba),
the carounda (carissa curonda), the prickly pear (opuntia, three species)
are, according to salt and climate, the most numerous, with which a thorny
creeper (guilandina bondue) is constantly intermingled".
It was in
search of traces of such a hedge that once ran across India that Moxham
traversed the countryside, a satellite global navigation system in hand.
Juxtaposing
his tale of discovery across time, Moxham's quest for the great hedge
reads like a blend of a detective story and a wide-eyed travelogue through
India. Like many Britons, Moxham is captivated by India; its exotic charm
and its enduring mysteries. But he was merely pursuing a tradition established
by the countless officials of the British Raj for whom India was only
incidentally a matter of colonialism and more a matter of adventure. The
hedge was a small example of that.
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