A review of the book 'The Great Hedge of India: The Search for the Living Barrier that Divided a People' written by Roy Moxham.
Throughout the 1990s Roy Moxham was a frequent visitor to India where he gathered a wide circle of Indian friends. A developing interest in Indian history, combined with a taste for travelling across remote areas, led to The Great Hedge of India.
This is the quest for a lost wonder of the world, in the author’s words a ‘ridiculous obsession’, sparked off by the chance discovery in a Charing Cross bookshop of the dusty memoirs of a nineteenth-century British official.
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Coming up: A review of the book 'The Great Hedge of India: The Search for the Living Barrier that Divided a People' written by Roy Moxham.
Namaste Friends. My name is 'Shinil Subramanian Payamal' and you are listening to the Historylogy podcast.
Before I proceed, a full disclosure: This book was bought with my own money and not been provided to me by the author or publisher.
Little bit about the author:
Roy Moxham was born and brought up at Evesham in Worcestershire. At twenty-one he went to Malawi, then Nyasaland, as a tea planter. After thirteen years in Eastern Africa, he returned to England and set up an African art gallery in Covent Garden. In 1977 he decided to train as a book and paper conservator, and after qualifying at Camberwell College of Arts, worked for various archives and libraries, including Canterbury Cathedral. He is currently in charge of conversation at the University of London Library.
In 1990 he published a novel in Kenya, The Freelander, based on the true story of a group of nineteenth-century European idealists who tried to set up a commune on Mount Kenya.
Throughout the 1990s Roy Moxham was a frequent visitor to India where he gathered a wide circle of Indian friends. A developing interest in Indian history, combined with a taste for travelling across remote areas, led to The Great Hedge of India.
Let me read what is written on back cover of the book:
This is the quest for a lost wonder of the world, in the author’s words a ‘ridiculous obsession’, sparked off by the chance discovery in a Charing Cross bookshop of the dusty memoirs of a nineteenth-century British official.
The memoirs referred in passing to a mighty hedge of spiny Indian plum and thorny acacias, around 14 feet in height, that spanned the Indian subcontinent in the middle of the nineteenth-century, set in place to allow the collection of the Salt Tax by British customs officers. Inspired by the concept of this amazing living barrier, now forgotten, Roy Moxham set off to find out what had happened to it and whether any remnant existed today. His travels in India, and what he found there, form the basis for this illuminating book. Writer Jan Morris comments:
“At first I thought this remarkable book must be a hoax . . . It tells the story of one of the least-known wonders of Queen Victoria's India - a customs barrier 2,300 miles long, most of it made of hedge. It was patrolled by 12,000 men and would have stretched from London to Constantinople, yet few historians mention it and most of us have never heard of it. Could anything be more astonishing?”
Let me quote what Sir John Strachey had to say about the the Hedge or Customs Line:
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; and it was guarded by nearly 12,000 men … It would have stretched from London to Constantinople … It consisted principally of an immense impenetrable hedge of thorny trees and bushes.
The other interesting quote is by the Directors of the East India Company to Lord Robert Clive:
A monopoly of the necessaries of life, in any hands whatever, more specially in the hands of the English, who are possessed of such an overruling influence, is liable to the greatest abuses.
The book is part travelogue and part history and it contains 11 chapters which moves at a pretty rapid pace through small towns of Northern and Central India where the author is searching for the Great Hedge.
It’s nice to see the persistence of the author in searching for the elusive Hedge and his interactions with the locals who, as you might have guessed, are mostly unaware of the Great Hedge.
The book is around 225 pages and is easy to read and understand. I give the book 4.5/5. Surprisingly, there are no photographs of the places the author has searched, the people he met, and, most importantly, the section of the hedge he found! I wish he had at least published a few pictures, just like the map of India he has published.
The book is available for just under Rs. 400 on both Amazon India and Flipkart. And it is available for $15.99 on Amazon USA. I will provide the respective buy links in the show notes. Please check them out for the latest prices.
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