Salty nuts of Empire

Salt taxes started during Chandragupta Maurya's time. The thing is, says Roy Moxham, no one protested until the avaricious criminals of the East India Company raised the rate a hundred-fold

Even though collectively the English are amongst the nastiest people in the world, they do produce some quite endearing individuals if only for their nuttiness. I discovered one such last month. 

Indeed, think it might be a good idea for someone like Ram Guha to write a book called The English Nuts of India. The Brits will love it because they make such a point about being eccentric. 

The guy I discovered is called Roy Moxham. Back in 2002, he wrote a book back about how, in the latter part of the 19th century the bandits who ruled India built a 2,300-mile long hedge. The idea was to prevent the smuggling of salt between British India and the Indian states.

The hedge, yes hedge, was 20 feet deep in some places and about that high as well. The book is called, rightly, The Great Hedge of India.

One day in 1994, Moxham discovered this long forgotten nugget by accident. Piqued at how anyone could have thought this up, he decided to see if any of it was still left. 

So he turned up in India in 1996 and kept coming back until he found it five years later somewhere in Uttar Pradesh. He has described his adventures in this book, including an incident when a crocodile turned up when he was taking a dump on the banks of a river. 

The book also contains a detailed account of the history of salt taxes in India. They started during Chandragupta Maurya’s time. The thing is, says Moxham, no one protested until the avaricious criminals of the East India Company —have no doubts, that’s what they were — raised the rate a hundred-fold. And because they were pocketing the proceeds — a few billion pounds over 100 years from 1760 — the British government, which took over British India in 1860, decided to build the hedge. 

The other reason for building the hedge was that because salt taxes in British India were so high, people started smuggling it across from the Indian states. Since there was no money to build a wall, the customs department — corrupt as ever — decided to build the hedge with watch towers and little forts along its length. Their remnants is what Moxham found.

This crazy idea lasted for just a decade from 1879 to 1890 when it was abandoned. The man who made it truly affective was none other than the founder of the Congress party — Allan Octavian Hume.  At its peak it wound its way from Multan all the way to Bihar. It is amazing that some villagers in UP remembered when Moxham met them 120 years later. They said it was known as parmat lane (permit line).

Self-serving nuttiness

English nuttiness, although portrayed as their eccentricity now, was never without a self-serving purpose. For example, the circuit houses and the dak bungalows they built in remote places all over India had a hidden purpose as well — the good old binkitty-bonk on the side.

There were many delectable and salacious stories about the love life of the sahibs who would bring along their girlfriends for an amorous week or so while the memsahib was away in England. They remain a place for comfortable liaisons between male and female officers who were attracted to each other. 

These circuit houses and sometimes even the dak bungalows were exclusive and highly subsidised micro-sized hotels built in picturesque locations where the white officials of the Raj stayed while on tour. They were as essential to governing India as the police and army were because the Raj was run on the hoof. 

The circuit houses were for the higher ranks and the dak bungalows for the lower ones in the middle of dense forests. 

Many had now forgotten ghost stories attached to them. The dak bungalow at a place called Misrodh near Bhopal had the story of one Miss Rod — Misrodh, get it? — who committed suicide after her heart was broken by some cad of an Englishman. 

Then there is the story of a circuit house near Jabalpur. An Englishman’s ghost would visit there over Christmas. He had killed himself out of sheer loneliness. There were many like him.

Much of all this was captured in a book on these Raj babu resorts by Rajita Bhargava a few years ago. Like Moxham with the hedge, she decided to find out what these things were and have become. Unfortunately, the book is out of print and I can’t remember its name.