THE GREAT HEDGE OF INDIA By Roy Moxham, Constable, £ 14.99 Dabbling can be dangerous. Self delusion even more so. This book is proof of both statements. Roy Moxham has been a tea planter and gallery owner and is now a book conservator. At Quinto, the famous second-hand bookshop on Charing Cross Road he chanced upon a copy of W.H. Sleeman's Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official, a book with which most historians of 19th century India are familiar. In the book, he came across a footnote added by the editor of the volume. It was from a book by John Strachey, an Indian civil servant and father of Lytton. From the quotation he learnt about the salt tax in India, about the Customs Line the British had established to prevent salt smuggling and that the line was 2,300 miles long and 'consisted principally of an immense impenetrable hedge of thorny tress and bushes'. Thus was born a magnificent obsession. The idea of a gigantic hedge across the heart of India gave wings to Moxham's imagination. He began scouring books and documents in the India Office Library (then on Blackfriars Road near Waterloo station) and in the British Museum. He found references to the hedge but not to its precise location. Moxham decided to begin his own search. Armed with maps, an old army compass and a Global Positioning Systems navigator (bought for £ 125), he set off to India to find the remnants of the hedge. With the help of friends he tramped around the areas around Jhansi, Gwalior, Etawah and the Jamuna-Chambal doab. This book in large measure is a description of those travels interspersed with histories of the salt tax, smuggling and the Customs Line. There is also the wide-eyed discovery of an Englishman that his country, when it ruled India, set in place monstrous systems of exploitation and oppression. Also, it must be given to Moxham that in the quest for his Holy Grail, he took an enormous amount of pain and trouble. He moved across the rough terrain of Bundelkhand in private and government buses, on tempo, matador and tonga, rode side-saddle on a cycle, did his morning ablutions out in the open like any Indian villager, slept on charpoys and ate delicious meals of rotis, yoghurt and vegetables. Very few urban Indians - let alone foreigners - would go through all this even for the love of money. Moxham was driven. Did he find the hedge? You might well ask. Somewhere, after a long walk along the banks of the Chambal, an old villager points out the remains of the 'parmat lain': 'there between the fields, ran a narrow strip of grassy land. It was slightly raised and about twenty feet wide.' Further on, he finds clusters of 'thorny acacias topped the embankment. Some 20 feet high. Thorn-covered plum trees barred the way. It was impossible to tell whether the trees were original or re-seedings. Whichever they were, it was the Customs Hedge.'' Moxham thus convinced himself that he had made a major discovery. Very few of his readers will be thus convinced. Administrators of the Raj did conceive in the late 1860s of a Great Hedge to stop salt smuggling from the princely states. The project was abandoned because it was unviable and because by 1879, the Customs Line was removed. This is the principal reason why no historian has ever been concerned about the existence of the hedge or of its significance. History cannot be written out of obsessions. Any social scientist, Indian, European or Hottentot, who has done field work in rural India knows the pitfalls of taking seriously all that an Indian villager says. Moxham, because he is dabbling in history as a complete amateur, is innocent of all such scepticism. There is something almost child-like about his sense of discovery. A raised grassy embankment becomes the Customs Line on the testimony of a villager. A line on a map does not become a hedge on the ground.