Salt Lines: A forgotten 4,000-km ‘living border’ reappears in a Mumbai museum | India News

In the open-air plaza of Mumbai’s oldest museum, a long, zig-zag wall of cloth ripples in the breeze. At first glance, it looks like a giant curtain. Step closer to squint at the crimson prints on it and the cloth becomes a partition: neat plant patterns on one side and chaotic termite marks on the other. Block-printed deliberately with dyes from homegrown shrubs like babool and karonda, this 20-metre-long cotton wall at the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum quietly leads visitors back to a little-known 4,000-km hedge that once formed a thorny botanical border across India, buzzing with birds and bees.Part hedge, part fence, the Inland Customs Line — a forgotten boundary created by the British in the 19th century to enforce the Empire’s deadly salt tax— is the centrepiece of ‘Salt Lines’, the first Indian solo exhibition by artist duo Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser who go by Hylozoic/Desires.Created in collaboration with RMZ Foundation and India Art Fair and supported by Alkazi Foundation, the show revisits the colonial 4,000km long border of which 2,500km constituted a fence of plants also known as ‘The Great Hedge of India’. Stretching from the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal and patrolled by thousands of customs staff, the hedge–described as “utterly impassable to man or beast”–was built by the East India Company and later the British Raj to enforce the salt tax in the mid nineteenth century. “We first stumbled upon the incredible history of the Inland Customs Line when we were doing more general research on… salt,” the artists say. Its scale shocked them: “It seemed improbable to us that such a large botanical infrastructure could have existed for much of the 19th century without everyone knowing about it.”Salt, which had been lightly taxed under earlier Indian rulers and the Mughals, became one of the British Empire’s most lucrative revenue streams after Bengal Presidency governor Robert Clive’s victory at The Battle of Plassey in 1757. Through monopolies and price controls, the East India Company’s officials forced peasants and merchants to buy salt from government depots at inflated rates. Even during the catastrophic Bengal famine of 1770, which killed an estimated ten million people, land revenue and salt taxes were collected in full.Originally consisting of thorny branches and deadwood piled into a crude fence, it was designed to stop smugglers from moving coastal salt into British-controlled territories, where it was heavily taxed. From the 1860s, the British began converting it into a living hedge, planting hardy native shrubs, digging trenches, building embankments, and maintaining a patrol road. Under officials such as AO Hume, entire teams tended the hedge, watering, pruning, and replanting it.Between 1867 and 1870, Hume oversaw a dramatic expansion of the hedge. By 1869 it stretched more than 2,300 miles from the Indus to the Mahanadi, patrolled by nearly 12,000 men. The line snaked through what is now Pakistan, skirted Delhi, passed Agra, Jhansi, Hoshangabad, Khandwa, Chandrapur and Raipur, and terminated in present-day Odisha. Where living shrubs failed due to rocky soil or frost, stone walls were erected instead; elsewhere, dry hedges of dwarf Indian plum had to be rebuilt constantly after damage from insects, fire and storms.At its height, the hedge was said to be up to 12 feet high and 14 feet thick, made of tightly trimmed trees and shrubs of babool, Indian plum, carounda, prickly pear, and thuer, depending on the soil and climate, with a thorny creeper woven throughout. By the 1870s, more than 14,000 men were employed to guard and maintain it, making it one of the largest security operations in the subcontinent. “On no branch of their duties have the whole establishment bestowed anything like so much time, labour, care, and thought, as on the rearing of this barrier…after all it must be remembered that our barrier is to the Line what the Great Wall once was to China: alike its greatest work and its chiefest safeguard,” wrote Hume. The hedge was lost in the archives, say the artists who scoured the National Archives of India, the British Library, the South London Botanical Institute, the Alkazi Collections and more for its history. “We found textual evidence… but no imagery.” To fill the gap, they created speculative visual records such as re-enactments at Sambhar Lake, an important British salt outpost, and AI-generated images, printed using a 19th-century salt process and toned with gold.At the centre of ‘Salt Lines’ is ‘The Hedge of Halomancy’ (2025), a 23-minute film. It follows Mayalee, a courtesan known to history for resisting the British. “She refuses the British administrators… when they attempt to replace her traditional salt stipend with cash payments,” the artists explain. Salt, in the film, becomes material and metaphor. A three-dimensional salt crystal acts as “a magical talisman,” linking Mayalee to Hume and, symbolically, to Gandhi’s march to Dandi. In another room called the ‘Salt Office’, historical salt-tax objects including two photographs of Bombay’s salt satyagraha from the Alkazi Collection sit beside Salt Prints (2024). “Salt is an acid and a base, an amazing symbol of equilibrium,” the artists say. Sound underscores this tension. “The speculative chapters… are underpinned by bansuri and sitar,” says David. The archival sections use “tuba and percussion,” echoing British military bands and their transformation into Indian wedding music.How did the hedge disappear from public imagination? Nature played the first role. “Termites… begin to eat into the hedge,” the artists note. “Winds, rats, tigers stormed through parts of the hedge.” Human anger, it seems, finished the job. “During the 1857 mutiny, people burnt parts of the hedge down in fury.” When the British gained control over salt-producing regions like Sambhar Lake, they found a cheaper way to tax salt at its source. The hedge — expensive and unwieldy — was dismantled on April 1, 1879. Nature reclaimed it. The living shrubs died or were cut; deadwood was carted off by villagers; embankments eroded. Within decades, almost nothing remained. “The natural world’s resistance not only contributed to the fall of the hedge but also to its utter erasure from history,” say the artists.Many historians had never heard of it until British writer Roy Moxham rediscovered it in the 1990s, travelling across India to piece together its remnants for his book ‘The Great Hedge of India’. “People seldom realise how critical salt is to health,” wrote Moxham. “And yet, it seems inconceivable to me how this incredibly painful part of history, the immense abuse people endured at this time, could be so utterly forgotten.”When he set out to find the remnants of the Customs Hedge, Moxham had imagined the barrier as a piece of British whimsy constructed to collect a minor tax. Along the way, he realized that the men posted along it, mostly local recruits, worked in isolation for months, patrolling harsh terrain with sticks, whips, and firearms. Those caught bypassing the hedge faced imprisonment. Famine, he discovered, was worsened by the Salt Tax. In 1877–’78, crops failed from poor rains in the North-Western Provinces while grain was exported, causing starvation. Official reports recorded 1.3 million deaths, with most deaths attributed to disease rather than hunger, though salt deficiency increased mortality. “I had assumed it was merely a flamboyant boundary, perhaps fashioned by administrators with fond memories of English hedgerows,” wrote Moxham. “It was a terrible discovery to find that it had been constructed, and ruthlessly policed, so as to totally cut off an affordable supply of an absolute necessity of life,” he concluded. The hedge entered public conversation again in recent years. In 2022, UK-based runner Hannah Cox set out to trace the forgotten border by running 100 marathons in 100 days, following the path of the Great Hedge across the country. Her journey — physically retracing a line most Indians have never seen — sparked renewed interest in how a structure so long, so intrusive, and so central to colonial revenue vanished almost without a trace.It is fitting that the exhibition sits inside the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai’s oldest, built by the British in 1857 as the Victoria & Albert Museum, Bombay. For the artists, its vitrines and industrial models echo the themes of extraction in the exhibition while Tasneem Zakaria Mehta, the museum’s managing trustee and director, says ‘Salt Lines’ allows the institution to “engage with the nature of colonial artistic production… including local people who harvested and consumed salt.”As visitors leave ‘Salt Lines’, Hylozoic/Desires offer a last thought — a reminder of what the exhibition ultimately attempts: “All we know is that the artist’s work is to research rigorously, and then… enter into the missing gaps of history and the doubt of the future, and imagine how else we can be.”