The Great Hedge of India

This map of the Great Hedge of India has been on display in Somerset House as part of Salt Cosmologies, an art project by Hylozoic/Desires (Himali Singh Soin & David Soin Tappeser). 

'The project invokes the spectral presence of the so-called Great Salt Hedge, a vast, long-forgotten barrier of plants which the British colonial regime created in the 19th century to control and tax the movement of salt across the Indian subcontinent. This 4000-kilometre-long 'hedge' was made of thorny shrubs, locally found brush, sweet plums and prickly pears, and inhabited by birds and snakes. Although highly profitable, it was also a nuisance to maintain, often battered by winds, burnt during the rebellion of 1857 and eaten by termites. Now, it is largely erased from memory and the landscape.'    

This all sounds extraordinary, like some kind of vastly ambitious land art project, halfway between Christo-Jeanne Claude and David Nash. You would think that even at the time it might have been painted or photographed, but apparently not: 'it was neither beautiful nor picturesque, and by the time photography began to document such relics, the hedge had been abolished in 1878 - paraphrased from H.F. Pelham (historian and scholar), in his brief account on the Great Salt Hedge or Inland Customs Line'. Finding only textual records, the artists used an AI model to create 'several images to return the Inland Customs Line to collective memory.' My instinctive dislike of AI meant I preferred to use my imagination, drawing on the collection of archival materials (see above) displayed in Somerset House's old Salt Office. This included botanical illustrations and bird specimens - Allan Octavian Hume, the colonial administrator who oversaw construction of the Inland Customs Line, was also a prominent biologist and collector. The Hedge was a wildlife habitat as well as being an implement of imperialism (in 1930 Gandhi would famously protest the salt tax). 

In a separate Tate Britain installation the artists have installed a video projection (see below) which includes some contemporary quotes. This one is by Flora Annie Steel who wrote many books about India. The full text can be found on Project Gutenberg in a chapter called 'The Salt of the Earth'. In case you can't read it in this photograph, here's what she wrote:

It was a strange, weird barrier, a vast hedge of cactus and thorny acacia, of prickly palms and agaves, that thrust out their spiked swords boldly from a buckler of spine-set thicket... What a barrier it was! Forty feet high by as much broad! A grey-green mighty wall of leaves all starred with pink and yellow and white cactus blossoms, over which birds, butterflies and dragonflies fluttered, while on the round fleshy leaves the cochineal insects gathered, like tiny spots of blood, scarlet...

Postscript 

After I posted this, Gareth Evans kindly pointed out that the Great Hedge of India and imperial salt trade were explored a decade earlier in another (continuing) collaborative art project, 'Common Salt', by Sheila Ghelani and Sue Palmer. Their work is discussed in a fascinating 2021 article on the BBC website, 'The Mysterious Disappearance of the World's Largest Shrubbery'. It begins with Robert Moxham, author of The Great Hedge of India, who began researching the subject after finding a reference to it in a second-hand book he bought in 1994. 'Moxham made three trips to India in the mid-1990s, seeking it out. He pored over old maps and satellite imagery, travelled to small towns and spoke to villagers and locals in areas where the hedge was mentioned in historical records. In many places, Moxham found that the Hedge had just melted away.' Another researcher, Aisling O'Connor, made trips to Uttar Pradesh and found that the path of the hedge was now a road corridor. She got invited to a conference on Nuclear Energy to speak about the Great Hedge because "they were intrigued by how such a big project could have disappeared from memory in such a short time." The BBC article concludes by suggesting that trying to keep public memory of the hedge alive 'is a constant challenge', so it is probably good that more artists have recently been engaging with this fascinating structure.