The Great Hedge of India: A Thorny Wall Built for a Salt Tax

The Great Wall of China is famous. Far fewer people know that British India once grew a living wall — a hedge of thorny bushes — stretching for hundreds of kilometres across the country.

A tax on salt

Salt is essential for life, especially in hot climates. Under the East India Company and later British rule, salt was heavily taxed. Salt from the coasts and from places like Rajasthan could be smuggled into regions where the tax was higher, so authorities set up an inland customs line to stop it.

From line to hedge

By the 1860s and 1870s the customs line ran for well over 2,000 miles (3,000+ km), roughly from the Himalayan foothills down towards the Mahanadi in Odisha. Much of it was guarded by a dense barrier of thorny trees and bushes — babul, prickly pear and others — tended by thousands of customs officers. Smugglers had to get past the hedge and the patrols.

The cost to people

The tax made salt expensive for the poorest people, and historians link it to hardship during the famines of the era. The customs line was abolished in 1879 when salt taxes were equalised across the regions, and the hedge was left to fall apart.

Rediscovered

The hedge was nearly forgotten until the British writer Roy Moxham went looking for its remains, publishing The Great Hedge of India in 2001. Salt taxes, meanwhile, remained a grievance — Gandhi’s Salt March of 1930 targeted the salt tax directly.