It was by chance that Roy Moxham discovered from maps in London that there was a huge hedge, some 1,200 miles long and virtually impassable, to prevent the import of salt from western India, where it was cheap and plentiful, into the densely populated Bengal Presidency, where it was scarce and expensive. The reason for this was that the production and sale of salt had been a profitable monopoly first of the East India Company; then, after 1857, of the Government of India.
This was the object of the hedge, to keep high the price of salt in British India. Its construction began in the 1840s. The most effective parts of it were "live", growing, and it was a vast job to collect and plant the seeds for it, or to build a dead hedge of stakes and thorns or stone walls where a live hedge was impracticable. Many thousands of men were employed in its construction, and many more thousands patrolling it so that salt could not be smuggled through, or over it from the west. In 1878 the whole concept of the hedge was abandoned: there were more sophisticated ways of keeping up the price of salt.
Roy Moxham became obsessed with the idea of finding what, if anything, remained of the hedge. He succeeded, sort of, with the help of many Indian friends who, during his cold-weather visits in the late 1990s, helped him because they liked him - though they could not understand his obsession. After several visits to India he found, or thought he found, the pitiful remnants of the hedge. The real interest in Roy Moxham's book lies not in his search for the hedge, but in his position as a cold-weather visitor to India half a century after Independence. It is fascinating to compare this with that of the British Officer in India before Independence. Then, although thousands of army officers and civil servants were Indian, the British Officer (of whom this reviewer was one) had a prestige which to some extent separated him from Indians, except in some of the big States such as Hyderabad where upper-class Indians, whatever their politics, regarded themselves as at least the social equal of any European. Roy Moxham, in the India of the late 1990s, had no authority and no prestige. Despite his uncertain grasp of their language - worse than ours - he was far closer to Indians simply because we were in a position of authority and he wasn't. He was helped by his liking for Indian food, which was forever pressed on him.
He is no admirer of British rule, not even admitting that some of us meant well. The tax on salt he regards as the most iniquitous of all taxes, because salt is a basic need of the poor. He thinks that millions of Indians, thought to have died of starvation or disease, in fact died of salt deprivation. Perhaps if he had eaten more salt Mahatma Gandhi would not have suffered from his dreadful halitosis. It is greatly to Roy Moxham's credit that he never refers to "The Raj", an expression invented by the BBC about 1948 and never used before then.
Charles Chenevix Trench is an author and critic. His most recent book was Grace's Card: Irish Catholic Landlords 1600-1890 (Mercier)