THE GREAT HEDGE OF INDIA Book

Roy Moxham's tale begins in a secondhand bookshop on London's Charing Cross Road, where, for £25, he buys the memoirs of a nineteenth-century British colonial administrative officer. In the book Moxham stumbles upon a passing reference by its author to a great hedge that had been planted by the British across the Indian subcontinent. Manned and cared for by 12,000 men, the hedge stood for fifty years and at its greatest extent ran a length of 1,500 miles. That hedge, surely one of the largest man-made-and virtually forgotten-enterprises in human history, became what Moxham calls his "ridiculous obsession." At once a travel book and historical detective story, The Great Hedge of India chronicles a quest that takes Moxham from the British Library and the India Office Archive in London to the Indian subcontinent itself, in his attempt to discover whether this extraordinary, impenetrable green wall, which had so completely disappeared from two nations' memories, had in fact ever existed at all and, if it had, to what end. After years of research and travel that took him to charming, isolated villages in wilds rarely visited by tourists, Moxham succeeded where history had failed. Not only did he discover the inglorious role the hedge played within the huge commercial schemes that characterized the exploitative Raj but he also uncovered the final remnants of this British grand folly in India. His engrossing account in this volume sheds revelatory new light on British policy and administration in imperial India at the same time that it records Moxham's single-minded quest to restore to history what must be counted one of the wonders of the world. Read More