The Great Hedge of India: The Search for the Living Barrier That Divided a People

Moxham, a British library conservator, chanced one day on a book describing a giant hedge, running east to west, 2,500 miles long and six to 12 feet thick, and guarded by 12,000 men, in British India in the late 19th century. This ""eccentric enterprise... a quintessentially British folly,"" as Moxham calls the hedge, was designed as a customs border, in particular to collect the salt tax that was so oppressive to India's poor. Gandhi, who called the salt tax ""the most inhuman poll tax that ingenuity of man can devise,"" led a march in 1930 to illegally make salt from the sea, which signaled the beginning of his nonviolent struggle for India's independence from the British. Moxham became obsessed with the customs hedge, and in this account, he winningly describes how he enlisted the aid of Indian friends in the course of three trips to India to find the remnants of the hedge, which seems to be largely forgotten. Along the way, our intrepid explorer searched for scaled maps, mastered navigators and compasses, visited 2,000-year-old temples and became adept at getting people in several tiny isolated villages to house him, transport him and help him find the remains of the hedge. After finding two small remnants, he encounters an old man who remembers the old men in his youth talking about the hedge. The old man helps him on the final leg of his quest, where he locates the hedge not far from where he had calculated, based on an 1876 map, that it would be--at the same latitude, and only about one mile farther east. Moxham's debut offers an entertaining travel memoir and insight into a forgotten footnote to history. (Mar.)