Roy Moxham: The Great Hedge of India

By DAVID HILL*

It sounds like a Pythonesque reworking of The Great Wall of Next-to-India. But the astonishing thing existed, and this absorbing book outlines one man's obsessive quest for it.

In 1840, the British began planting a 3500km-long, 4m-high hedge of thorny Indian Plum and Acacia across much of the subcontinent. Like China's wall, this was to keep the unwanted out - till they had made their contribution to one of the East India Company's greatest money-raisers, the Salt Tax.

The hedge took 30 years to complete. It ran from north of the Indus near the Afghanistan border, down across the plains west of the Ganges, and in a great loop into the centre of India. Nearly 14,000 men were needed to maintain it. Yet history made almost no mention.

So how did a tea-planter turned book conservator find out about it? From a purchase in a Charing Cross second-hand bookshop, whose title also sounds like a hoax: Rambles and Reflections of an Indian Official, by Maj-Gen Sir W.H. Sleeman KCB, pub 1893. Moxham headed for the Indian Office Records, 13km of shelving in Blackfriars Rd. He had already planned to revisit India. Now he was after maps to take with him.

So yes, this is a detective story. And a tour journal. Not a package tour, though; the author reaches one destination after two hours sidesaddle on a bicycle; his en suite is a village field.

For two years, Moxham shuttled between England and India, scanning thousands of likely books and maps in the British Library and Royal Geographic Archives; buying a Global Positioning System navigator; walking along railway lines, taking a day to buy train tickets in a subcontinent where spy paranoia made the rococo bureaucracy regard him with dark suspicion.

The book, too, is an alternation - between the narrative of his search and chapters discussing the British Raj (Clive of India as entrepreneur, drug addict, suicide); rather ingenuous comments on the medical importance of sodium chloride; Gandhi's famous protests against the tax (it lasted, improbably enough, till partition in 1947).

For a long time, Moxham's quest found nothing. He notes that one visit to India coincided with the civil unrest following rumours of a shortage of ... salt.

But there were compensations. He likes Indian people, Indian food - cream yoghurt blended with lychees and saffron, the immense, earth-coloured landscape. He sees them through clear rather than rosy lenses. Anecdotes, impressions, analyses - the book fairly bangs along.

And finally he finds his grail, with the aid of a Hindu monk who graduated from banditry, and with separate assistance from tea-and-biscuit-offering villagers. The Great Hedge of India still exists, faded and ragged as befits the British Empire.

Constable & Robinson

$32.95

* David Hill is a Taranaki writer.