Inland Customs Line
The Inland Customs Line, incorporating the Great Hedge of India, was a customs barrier built by the British colonial rulers of India to prevent smuggling of salt from coastal regions in order to avoid the substantial salt tax.
The customs line was begun under the East India Company and continued into direct British rule. The line had its beginnings in a series of customs houses established in Bengal in 1803 to prevent the smuggling of salt to avoid the tax. These customs houses were eventually formed into a continuous barrier that was brought under the control of the Inland Customs Department in 1843.
The line was gradually expanded as more territory was brought under British control until it covered more than, often running alongside rivers and other natural barriers. It ran from the Punjab in the northwest to the princely states of Orissa, near the Bay of Bengal, in the southeast. The line was initially made of dead, thorny material such as the Indian plum but eventually evolved into a living hedge that grew up to high and was compared to the Great Wall of China. The Inland Customs Department employed customs officers, jemadars and men to patrol the line and apprehend smugglers, reaching a peak of more than 14,000 staff in 1872.
The line and hedge were abandoned in 1879 when the British seized control of the Sambhar Salt Lake in Rajasthan and applied tax at the point of manufacture. The salt tax itself remained in place until 1946.
Origins
When the Inland Customs Line was first conceived, British India was governed by the East India Company. This situation lasted until 1858 when the responsibility for government of the colony was transferred to the Crown following the events of the Indian Rebellion of 1857. By 1780 Warren Hastings, the company's Governor-General of India, had brought all salt manufacture in the Bengal Presidency under company control. This allowed him to increase the ancient salt tax in Bengal from 0.3 rupees per maund to 3.25 rupees per maund by 1788, a rate that it remained at until 1879. This brought in 6,257,470 rupees for the 1784–85 financial year, at a cost to an average Indian family of around two rupees per year. There were taxes on salt in the other British India territories but the tax in Bengal was the highest, with the other taxes at less than a third of the Bengal tax rate.It was possible to avoid paying the salt tax by extracting salt illegally in salt pans, stealing it from warehouses or smuggling salt from the princely states which remained outside of direct British rule. The latter was the greatest threat to the company's salt revenues. Much of the smuggled salt came into Bengal from the west and the company decided to act to prevent this trade. In 1803 a series of customs houses and barriers were constructed across major roads and rivers in Bengal to collect the tax on traded salt as well as duties on tobacco and other imports. These customs houses were backed up by "preventative customs houses" located near salt works and the coast in Bengal to collect the tax at source.
These customs houses alone did little to prevent the mass avoidance of the salt tax. This was due to the lack of a continuous barrier, corruption within the customs staff and the westward expansion of Bengal towards salt-rich states. In 1823 the Commissioner of Customs for Agra, George Saunders, installed a line of customs posts along the Ganges and Yamuna rivers from Mirzapur to Allahabad that would eventually evolve into the Inland Customs Line. The main aim was to prevent salt from being smuggled from the south and west but there was also a secondary line running from Allahabad to Nepal to prevent smuggling from the Northwest frontier. The annexation of Sindh and the Punjab allowed the line to be extended north-west by G. H. Smith, who had become Commissioner of Customs in 1834. Smith exempted items such as tobacco and iron from taxation to concentrate on salt and was responsible for expanding and improving the line, increasing its budget to 790,000 rupees per year and the staff to 6,600 men. Under Smith, the line saw many reforms and was officially named the Inland Customs Line in 1843.
Inland Customs Line
Smith's new Inland Customs Line was first concentrated between Agra and Delhi and consisted of a series of customs posts at one mile intervals, linked by a raised path with gateways to allow people to cross the line every four miles. Policing of the barrier and surrounding land, to a distance of, was the responsibility of the Inland Customs Department, headed by a Commissioner of Inland Customs. The department staffed each post with an Indian Jemadar and ten men, backed up by patrols operating 2–3 miles behind the line. The line was mainly concerned with the collection of the salt tax but also collected tax on sugar exported from Bengal and functioned as a deterrent against opium, bhang and cannabis smuggling.The end of company rule in 1858 allowed the British government to expand Bengal through territorial acquisitions, updating the line as needed. In 1869 the government in Calcutta ordered the connection of sections of the line into a continuous customs barrier stretching from the Himalayas to Orissa, near the Bay of Bengal. This distance was said to be the equivalent of London to Constantinople. The north section from Tarbela to Multan was lightly guarded with posts spread further apart as the wide Indus River was judged to provide a sufficient barrier to smuggling. The more heavily guarded section was around long and began at Multan, running along the rivers Sutlej and Yamuna before terminating south of Burhanpur. The final section reverted to longer distances between customs posts and ran east to Sonapur.
In the 1869–70 financial year the line collected 12.5 million rupees in salt tax and 1 million rupees in sugar duties at a cost of 1.62 million rupees in maintenance. In this period the line employed around 12,000 men and maintained 1,727 customs posts. By 1877 the salt tax was worth £6.3 million to the British government in India, with the majority being collected in the Madras and Bengal provinces, lying on either side of the customs line.
Great Hedge
It is not known when an actual live hedge was first grown along the customs line but it is likely that it began in the 1840s when thorn bushes, cut and laid along the line as a barrier, took root. By 1868 it had become of "thoroughly impenetrable" hedge. The original dry hedge consisted mainly of samples of the dwarf Indian plum fixed to the line with stakes. This hedge was at risk of attack by white ants, rats, fire, storms, locusts, parasitic creepers, natural decay and strong winds which could destroy furlongs at a time and necessitated constant maintenance. Allan Octavian Hume, Commissioner of Inland Customs from 1867 to 1870, estimated that each mile of dry hedge required 250 tons of material to construct and that this material had to be carried to the line from between away. The amount of labour involved in such a task was one of the reasons that a live hedge was encouraged, particularly as damage required the replacement of around half of the dry hedge each year.In 1869 Hume, in preparation for a rapid expansion of the live hedge, began trials of various indigenous thorny shrubs to see which would be suited to different soil and rainfall conditions. The result was that the main body of the hedge was composed of Indian plum, babool, karonda and several species of Euphorbia. The prickly pear was used where conditions meant that nothing else could grow, as was found in parts of the Hisar district, and in other places bamboo was planted. Where the soil was poor it was dug out and replaced or overlain with better soil and in flood plains the hedge was planted on a raised bank to protect it. The hedge was watered from nearby wells or rainwater collected in large, purpose-built trenches and a "well made" road was constructed along its entire length.
Hume was responsible for transforming the hedge from "a mere line of persistently dwarf seedlings, or of irregularly scattered, disconnected bushes" into a formidable barrier that, by the end of his tenure as commissioner, contained of "perfect" hedge and of "strong and good", but not impenetrable hedge. The hedge was nowhere less than high and thick and in some places was high and thick. Hume himself remarked that his barrier was "in its most perfect form,... utterly impassable to man or beast".
Hume also substantially realigned the Inland Customs Line, joining separate sections and removing some of the spurs that were no longer necessary. Where this happened, whole runs of hedge were abandoned, and the men would have to construct a hedge from scratch on the new alignment. The living hedge was terminated at Burhanpur in the south, beyond which it could not grow, and at Layyah in the north where it met the River Indus, whose strong current was judged sufficient to deter smugglers. Historian Henry Francis Pelham compared the use of the Indus in this way to that of the River Main, in modern Germany, for the Roman Limes Germanicus fortifications.
Hume was replaced as Commissioner of Customs in 1870 by G. H. M. Batten who would hold the post for the next six years. His administration saw little realignment of the hedge but extensive strengthening of the existing run, including the building of stone walls and ditch and bank systems where the hedge could not be grown. By the end of Batten's first year he had increased the length of "perfect" hedge by, and by 1873 the central portion between Agra and Delhi was said to be almost impregnable. The line was altered slightly in 1875–6 to run alongside the newly built Agra Canal, which was judged a sufficient obstacle to allow the distance between guard posts to be increased to.
Batten's replacement as Commissioner was W. S. Halsey who was the last to be in charge of the Great Hedge. Under Halsey's control the hedge grew to its greatest extent, reaching a peak of of "perfect" and "good" live hedge by 1878 with a further of inferior hedge, dry hedge or stone wall. The live hedge extended to at least and in places was backed up with an additional dry hedge barrier. All maintenance work was halted on the hedge in 1878 after a decision was made that the line would be abandoned in 1879.