Obscure Occupations - Greensmen

 The Great Hedge of  India

Map Showing the hedge in green

The Great Hedge of India was part of India’s inland customs line. Started in 1840s by the East India Company as a series of guard houses in Bengal, and taken over by the British government in 1858, it gradually became a continuous barrier stretching from the Punjab in the North West of India, in what is now Pakistan, to Orissa near the Bay of Bengal in the South East, a distance of some 2,300 miles, a comparable distance with London to Istanbul. The barrier produced a stranglehold on trade and travel for the whole of the Indian sub-continent. 

One official wrote that it could be “compared to nothing else in the world other than the Great Wall of China.”

Nobody knows who first had the idea to build a hedge across the heart of India, and crazy as it may sound, it was certainly not frivolous.  It’s sole purpose was to exploit one of the most basic ingredients for human survival, salt.   It was a bureaucratic barrier created to impose a high salt tax on people living on one side or other of the line.   Historically salt was produced on the West coast along the Rann of Kutch, a huge saltmarsh on the Arabian Sea and on the East coast it was obtained extensively along the coast of Orissa.  The coastal salt works were leased out to the highest bidder who in turn had to sell the salt back to the Customs Company at a fixed rate.  The Company then sold the salt in the open market at vastly inflated prices that very few could afford.

The barrier was originally constructed of dry thorn bushes cut and piled high, some of the cuttings took root and when Allan Hume (a botanist) took over as Commissioner of Inland Customs in 1867, he realised that a living hedge would be far more economical and practical than a dry one.  He began experimenting with different types of plants, taking regard to the soil and water conditions.

 He used plants that were common to the areas, most of which had been used in Indian medicine since time immemorial, primarily Indian Plum, a bushy shrub or tree with a spiny trunk and branches,  as a shrub it grows to 25ft and as a tree to 50ft.  Babool, (Acacia Arabica) and Karonda (Carissa Carandas) were also used extensively.  Babool has fluid filled projections which are tapped for Gum Arabic.  It grows in desert regions, it is a fast growing spiny evergreen which can grow up to 50ft high.  Karonda is also rapid growing and requires no attention for it to flourish.  It reaches 40ft in height and produces red berries, similar to cranberries, used in Indian pickles and spices and was used by the British to make jams, jellies and syrups.  In arid regions Hume also used the non-native Prickly Pear.  Where the soil was very poor he had ditches dug and refilled with better soil and where there was a danger of flooding he raised embankements, he also had irrigation trenches dug to bring water from wells.  The hedge grew into a formidable barrier that was nowhere less than 8ft high and 4ft thick, whilst in some places it was up to 12ft high and 14 ft thick!   During the construction of the hedge workers dug over 7 tons of soil and carried 150,000 tons of thorny hedge material.

All maintenance work was halted on the hedge in 1879 after a series of government financial reforms.   It was realised that the hedge was having a serious effect on travel and free trade and thus tax revenue for the whole of the Indian sub-continent.

In 1995 Roy Moxam, a conservator at the library of the University of London, found mention of the hedge in the journal of an Indian Official and determined to find out how such a huge undertaking could have been forgotten in just over 100 years.  He undertook three journeys to India but could only find a small stretch of embankment in Uttar Pradesh and no local knowledge along the route.  His book “The Great Hedge of India” was published in 2001.