In the open grounds of Mumbai’s oldest museum, a long, zig-zag wall of fabric flutters in the wind. At first glance it looks like a giant curtain. Get closer to see the red prints on it and the cloth becomes a partition: neat plant patterns on one side and chaotic termite marks on the other. Deliberately block-printed with the colors of domesticated shrubs like acacia and karonda, this 20-metre-long cotton wall at the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum silently leads visitors to a little-known 4,000-kilometre fence that once formed a thorny botanical border across India, buzzing with birds and bees.Part fence, part fence, Inland Customs Line – a forgotten border built by the British in the 19th century to enforce the empire’s deadly salt tax – is the centerpiece of ‘Salt Lines’, artist duo Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tepesser’s first Indian solo exhibition, based on Hylozoic/Desires.Created in collaboration with the RMZ Foundation and India Art Fair and supported by the Alkazi Foundation, the show revisits the colonial 4,000 km long border, 2,500 km of which consists of a hedge 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 “completely impassable to man or beast” – was built in the mid-nineteenth century by the East India Company and later the British Raj to enforce the salt tax. “While we were doing more general research on salt, we first came across the incredible history of the Inland Customs Line,” the artists say. Its scale shocked him: “It seemed impossible to us that such a large botanical infrastructure could have existed for most of the 19th century without everyone knowing about it.”Salt, which had previously been lightly taxed under Indian rulers and the Mughals, became one of the most lucrative revenue streams of the British Empire after the victory of Robert Clive, Governor of the Bengal Presidency, at the Battle of Plassey in 1757. Through monopoly and price controls, East India Company officials forced farmers and traders to purchase salt from government depots at inflated rates. Even during the devastating Bengal famine of 1770, in which an estimated ten million people died, land revenue and salt taxes were collected in full.Originally consisting of thorny branches and dead wood piled into a crude fence, it was designed to prevent smugglers from taking coastal salt to British-controlled areas, where it was heavily taxed. From the 1860s, the British began converting it into living fences, planting hardy native bushes, digging trenches, building embankments and maintaining patrol roads. Under officers like AO Hume, entire teams took care of fencing, watering, pruning, and replanting it.Between 1867 and 1870, Hume oversaw a dramatic expansion of the hedge. By 1869 it extended over 2,300 miles from the Indus to the Mahanadi, with about 12,000 men patrolling it. This line passed through what is now Pakistan, passing through Delhi, Agra, Jhansi, Hoshangabad, Khandwa, Chandrapur and Raipur and ending in present-day Odisha. Where living bushes were destroyed by rocky soil or frost, stone walls were erected in their place; Elsewhere, dry groves of dwarf Indian plum had to be constantly rebuilt after damage by insects, fire and storms.At its height, the fence is said to have been 12 feet high and 14 feet thick, made of tightly pruned trees and bushes of acacia, Indian plum, gooseberry, prickly pear and thuar, depending on the soil and climate, with a thorny creeper woven throughout. By the 1870s, more than 14,000 people were employed to protect and maintain it, making it one of the largest security operations in the subcontinent. Hume wrote, “The whole establishment has devoted nothing like so much time, labour, care, and thought to any branch of its duties, as to the construction of this barrier…After all it must be remembered that our barrier is to the line what the Great Wall was once to China: equally its greatest work and its chief security.” The artists, who explored the National Archives of India, the British Library, the South London Botanical Institute, the Alkazi Collections and much more about its history, say that Hayes was lost in the archives. “We found textual evidence… but no imagination.” To fill the gap, they created imaginary visual records such as re-enactments of Sambhar Lake, an important British salt outpost, and AI-generated images that were printed using the 19th-century salt process and toned with gold.At the center of ‘Salt Lines’ is the 23-minute film ‘The Hedge of Halomancy’ (2025). It is based on a prostitute named Mayali, who is known in history for opposing the British. The artist explains, “They refused the British administrators… when they attempted to replace their traditional salt stipends with cash payments.” In the film, salt becomes both physical and metaphorical. A three-dimensional salt crystal serves as a “magical talisman”, connecting Maylee to Hume and symbolically to Gandhi’s Dandi March. In another room called the ‘Salt Office’, historical salt-tax objects including two photographs of Bombay’s Salt Satyagraha from the Alkazi collection are housed near Salt Prints (2024). “Salt is an acid and a base, a wonderful symbol of balance,” the artists say. Sound underlines this tension. David says, “The speculative chapters… are based on flute and sitar.” The archival sections use “tuba and percussion”, echoing their transformation into British military bands and Indian wedding music.How did Hayes disappear from the public imagination? Nature played the first role. “The termites…started eating the fence,” the artists said. “Winds, rats, tigers entered parts of the enclosure.” It seems that man’s anger has done the job. “During the rebellion of 1857, people burned parts of the fence in anger.” When the British gained control of salt producing areas like Sambhar Lake, they found a cheap way to tax the salt at its source. The defenses – expensive and cumbersome – were destroyed on April 1, 1879. Nature reclaimed it. Surviving bushes died or were cut down; Dead wood was removed by the villagers; The embankments broke. Within decades, almost nothing remained. “Resistance from the natural world contributed not only to Hayes’ decline, but also to its complete erasure from history,” the artists say.Many historians had not heard of it until British author Roy Moxham rediscovered it in the 1990s, and traveled across India to collect its remains for his book ‘The Great Hedge of India’. Moxham wrote, “People seldom realize how important salt is to health.” “And yet, it seems inexplicable to me how this incredibly painful part of history, the enormous abuse endured by people at this time, could be so completely forgotten.,When he set out to find the remains of the Customs Hedge, Moxham had imagined the barrier as a piece of British whimsy constructed to collect minor taxes. Along the way, they realized that the people deployed with it, mostly local recruits, worked in isolation for months, patrolling the harsh terrain with sticks, whips, and firearms. Those caught bypassing defense faced imprisonment. He found that the famine had become worse because of the salt tax. In 1877–’78, poor rains in the North-Western Provinces led to crop failure while grain was exported, leading to famine. Official reports recorded 1.3 million deaths, most of which were caused by disease rather than hunger, although salt shortages increased the mortality rate. Moxham wrote, “I had assumed that it was merely a fantastic boundary, probably created by administrators with fond memories of English hedgerows.” He concluded, “It was a terrible discovery that it had been constructed, and ruthlessly policed, so as to completely cut off the cheap supply of the absolute necessities of life.” Hayes re-entered the public conversation in recent years. In 2022, UK-based runner Hannah Cox set out to explore the forgotten frontier by running 100 marathons in 100 days, following the route of the Great Hedge across the country. His journey – physically retracing a line that most Indians never saw – sparked renewed interest in how a structure so long, so intrusive, and so central to colonial revenue disappeared almost without trace.It is fitting that this exhibition is housed inside Mumbai’s oldest Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum, built by the British in 1857 as the Victoria and Albert Museum, Bombay. As 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 the local people who harvested and consumed the salt.,As visitors leave ‘Salt Lines’, Hylozoic/Desires offers one final thought – a reminder of what the exhibition ultimately strives for: “All we know is that the artist’s job is to research rigorously, and then… enter into the lost gaps of history and the doubts of the future, and imagine how else we might be.”
