There was a hedge once.

(Technically this article cannot be included under “Heritage of Haryana” but nonetheless it is a part of Haryana’s history.)

This article is about a piece of history that was once like a mammoth but still it managed to stay hidden from historians for a very long time. Even after more than 130 years not much has been discovered, heard and written about it.

Here i am writing about my own chance discovery of this little known fact - there was a hedge once.

It all began with a visit to an elderly person few months back (2013). I had met him to know more about the history of a village (Mundhal). Until then i was not at all familiar with the works of Roy Moxham and was not even expecting to find something unusual that would eventually be leading me to look for one of his books.

This person i had met, told me several stories related to the village and its history along with some famous anecdotes of long gone ancestors. Among these, there was this one story of a horse which I kind of rejected as soon as I heard it. Why? Because, I could not understand its relevance and failed to see any connections it could have had with the history of the village.

This story goes something like this-

A distant ancestor used to have a mare and there was one specialty about her- she could jump very high and could cover long distances. In the story, she was used for carrying items from one side of a large fence to the other side.

Naturally, I could not see anything of my interest in that story. I was more like, What was the need for showing off these equestrian skills when they could have cut a way across that fence, if it was that much necessary? I felt as if it was a conjured up tale and wrote only two words in my notes- fence and horse.

But a few days later I had to meet the same person again for some more information and this time he said that the fence he was talking about the other day, was also mentioned in a recent local newspaper.I don’t know why, but this time also I did not pay any attention (perhaps it was not, what i was looking for). Luckily my grandfather was with me that day and upon his insistence I had to search for that newspaper.

And finally the paper was dug out (Dainik Bhaskar of 15/08/2013) and when I started reading this small article, somehow the dots began to connect. Along with this article there was a small map of India with a curved line drawn across it. The sentence that caught my attention was-‘once this hedge (the curved line) was comparable to the great wall of China’. I got inspired further and started digging deeper.

I googled it and found this Wikipedia article on “Inland Customs Line”. Roy Moxham and his book “The Great Hedge of India” were mentioned in it. Now, for the first time, I began to think that even if this hitherto irrelevant story had the slightest of truth in it, it would be making strong and strange connections.Thinking that I bought this book and started reading it. 

On the very first page, there was a map of Indian subcontinent and a line was carved across it. Most thrilling part was seeing a familiar name on this map-“Hissar”. This line was connecting Hissar to Delhi on one side and to Fazilka on other side and this village of ours would have fallen  right on or very close to this line!. I began to read further and could stop only when I found that there were no more pages left.

Roy Moxham has written such a wonderful 234 page book that along with all the necessary history describes his adventurous journey in search of any last remaining signs of this once large custom fence.

After reading this book my reaction was similar to that of Roy Moxham (he has written about it in his book) that it was such a long hedge and yet there was no mention of it in any of the history books.

Custom Hedge (fence):-

Source:- The Great Indian Hedge by Roy Moxham

This hedge was built to separate the British occupied territories from the princely states and for collecting the revenue by taxing the goods being exchanged between these areas. Salt and sugar were two main items on which tax was being collected. There were check posts on this entire 1500 mile long hedge and it was manned by a huge staff of more than 14000 persons at its peak (1872).

It was also known as a live hedge as it was built using locally found thick and thorny vegetation. At many places it had grown so thick that it was almost impenetrable.

A.O.Hume, who was the commissioner of inland customs in 1869-70 wrote in his reports:

“A great variety of experiments have been tried; almost every description of locally indigenous thorny shrubs has been tried, whenever peculiar difficulties were experienced.”  (p100, Roy Moxham)

In the same report, Hume further wrote:

“Many miles of bank have again been thrown up for the growth of the prickly pear in places like Urneewalla (Hissar), where nothing else will grow.” (p101, R.M.)

Until its discontinuation in April 1879, this customs hedge was running from Burhanpur roughly north- via Khandwa, Hoshangabad, Sagar, Jhansi, Jalaun, Agra, Mathura, Rohtak, Hissar and Fazilka. At Fazilka it entered into present day Pakistan.

Now Let's get back to our story:-

At first I thought this could only be a coincidence but when I roughly tried to attach a time line to the generations (approximately 20-30 years to a generation), time period was getting aligned with the period of hedge (1860-1880s).

In this story I was told that this fence was along the present day National Highway 10. It was approximately 8-10 feet high and also quite wide. On one side of it there was availability of cheaper Salt and on the other side, cheaper Sugar.

On one side of this hedge was perhaps the territory of then princely state of Jind(Jheend) and on the other side British Indian territories (remember this hedge was abandoned in 1879 and hence no living memory of it so all we have are its fragments, embedded deep inside anecdotes like this one).

By then i was sure that at least this fence was a real thing.

Back to back famines of 1860-61 (Upper Doab Famine) and of 1869 (Rajputana famine) coupled with inadequate relief measures of then British-Indian government would perhaps had made people desperate to find ways across this fence in order to procure items (Salt and sugar) of daily use at an affordable prices. In such a tough times it was perhaps not possible for them to acquire these items through a proper manner.

And i had understood the role of that mare too.

(Although one can still debate on the height that a horse can jump but as per Wikipedia article Jumping Horse ,world record is of 8 feet and few inches. Back then they were not trying for some record so they might have found out other ways of getting that mare over the fence safely or may be that mare was really capable that's why she is still alive in the stories)

Moral of the story:-

What I have tried to learn from this is that even the smallest piece of information that may sound completely irrelevant at first, might end up providing a lot more useful information. 

Since, we did not have the tradition of writing history back then because of lack of familiarity with scripts in our most of rural parts. Despite all this, our elders/ancestors had tried their best to keep the history alive through stories like these.

During its passage from one generation to another, often new elements get added to it and some parts might get distorted or forgotten but still that story should not be discarded simply on its face value (as i was trying to do). After all we are left with only that story and it might still have a lot of elements of truth in it.

Now it is up to the educated (at least script familiar) generation to put this dwindling and long kept alive oral history bank into a written format and who knows maybe, we might end up finding something as interesting as this long forgotten custom hedge.