CHENNAI: The image of the father of the nation M K Gandhi picking up grains of salt at the end of the Dandi March on March 12, 1930, against the imposition of the heavy salt duty during the struggle for Indian Independence is still alive in public memory, but British travel writer Roy Moxham brought to light the worst exploitation during the salt tax collection by East India Company in the 19th century.
“A great hedge established by the East India Company for 1500 miles as part of a customs line which divided India from the Himalayas to Orissa, to prevent the smuggling of salt during the 1850s. Moreover, nearly 12,000 men were appointed to guard the hedge,” said Roy Moxham to City Express during his recent visit. Though he published a book titled, The Great Hedge of India way back in 2001, Roy Moxham says it hasn’t reached a large audience in India, unlike in the West.
“Now I am happy that it is getting published in Tamil under the Uppuveli by Madurai based-Ezhuthu publishing house on Sunday in Chennai because it will provoke young minds to look back at their past,” said the author.
Roy was not trained as a professional historian, but his curiosity to learn about the missing links in history, brought him to India. In 1995, Roy, an antique collector paid 25 pounds for Rambles and Recollection of an Indian Official written by Major General Sir W H Sleeman.
“What caught my attention was a footnote in which it was mentioned that to secure the levy of a duty on salt, a customs line with a hedge of thorny trees and bushes was established across India,” he recalled. Initially, Roy didn’t believe it. However when he started working as conservator of the University of London, he come across Strachey’s book written jointly with his brother Richard called The Finances and Public Works of India, 1869-1881 in which he compared the hedge with the Great Wall of China.
“It was then that I decided to travel to India in search of the remains of the hedges or to learn about this. With a help of a few young people, I traveled the route where the hedge was established first, in September 1996,” he said.
Roy was surprised to find most of the places were converted either into agriculture fields or buildings, but he managed to find the remains of a small stretch in Uttar Pradesh in 1998. “The people there don’t remember much about the hedge,” he said.
However his search for the hedge has exposed the worst exploitative salt tax collection system put in place by the East India Company. “Thousands of people died due to salt depletion. To pay a salt tax, people have to spend two months of their salary. Famines occurred periodically since the imposition of the salt tax in the northwestern provinces,” he said.
In the last 15 years of the customs lines, there were also famines in Orissa, Bihar, North Bengal and the Central Provinces. For those years alone, the official report recorded a total of 3,761,420 famine deaths. The real total was probably closer to 5,000,000.
“People who needed all their money for grain couldn’t afford to buy salt. Very many of the victims died of fever and diarrhoea, and were doubtless doomed by salt depletion. Many of them were Dalits,” he pointed out.
(The Tamil version of The Great Hedge of India by Roy Moxham was released in Chennai on Sunday.)