Starting at the Attari-Wagah border, the international boundary between India and Pakistan, Hannah Cox, 41, an entrepreneur from the UK, started running towards Odisha in the early hours of October 26. From here, she plans to run towards West Bengal’s border with Bangladesh — a part of her plan to complete 100 marathons in 100 days in India under ‘Project Salt Run’.
Not only does this 4,200-km route wind through nine Indian states, it reaches into a dark chapter in the subcontinent’s history — and Cox’s own past as a descendant of British colonists. She said her family had worked for the British East India Company.
“My ancestors were part of the British colonial system, and acknowledging that truth is part of how I can help rewrite the narrative now,” she tells The Indian Express.
Through her crowdfunded run, Cox is tracing the notorious Inland Customs Line or the Great Hedge of India, which was established by the British to implement the salt tax.
While the history of resistance to this tax, culminating in Mahatma Gandhi’s Dandi March, is well documented, to find references to the Great Hedge in history, one would have to be dedicated.
In their 1882 book, The Finances and Public Works of India from 1869 to 1881, brothers Sir John and Richard Strachey, who worked as administrative officers in British India, write ,“To secure the levy of a duty on salt …. there grew up gradually a monstrous system, to which it would be almost impossible to find a parallel in any tolerably civilised country. A Customs Line was established which…in 1869 extended from the Indus to the Mahanadi in Madras…It consisted principally on an immense impenetrable Hedge of thorny trees and bushes. a forgotten colonial boundary once built to control movement and extract profit”.
How complete is the erasure of the Hedge? British writer Roy Moxham wrote in his book The Great Hedge of India: “…when I checked the two standard histories of India published by the Oxford and Cambridge University presses, there was no mention of this barrier, nor in other histories that I consulted. I managed, however, to locate the printed report for 1869-1870, and for several other years, in the collections transferred to the British Library from the old India Office. (It seems that there are no copies in India.).”
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Cox too learnt about the Hedge in 2014, three years after the death of her father, Deric Dennis Cox, who was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata) and raised in the UK, but “never spoke much about his
heritage”.
“It wasn’t until after my dad passed away that I realised how much I didn’t know about him, about where we came from and what that history meant. So, in many ways, Project Salt Run started as a way of filling in those silences and, for me, to explore how, as a White person in the UK, despite the fact my Dad was Anglo-Indian, I did not receive any of the racism or difficulties I saw friends receiving as second-generation immigrants, even though I am one also,” says Cox.
Stunned that the Hedge had been almost completely forgotten, Cox said she “knew then that I wanted to bring it back into the public consciousness not as a line of division, but as a route of reconnection”.
She said one of the goals of Project Salt Run is to raise £1 million for four charities — 1% for the Planet, Frank Water, Big Change and ClientEarth.
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“Project Salt Run isn’t about punishment or endurance for its own sake. It’s about remembrance and reclamation. It’s about transforming a symbol of control into a route of connection, hope and healing,” she says.