Objects and Frontiers in Modern Asia

Between the Mekong and the Indus

Lipokmar Dzüvichü, Manjeet Baruah

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429537486
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

Focusing on the geographies between the Mekong and the Indus, this book brings objects to the centre of enquiry in the understanding of modern Asian frontiers. It explores how a range of objects have historically been significant bearers and agents of frontier making. For instance, how are objects connected to aspects of state making, social change, everyday life, diplomacy, political and ecological worlds, capital, forms of violence, resistances, circulations, and aesthetic expressions?

This book seeks to interrogate and understand the dynamism of frontiers from the vantage point of objects such as salt, rubber, tea, guns, silk scarves, horses, and opium. It attempts to explore objects as sites of encounter, mediation, or dislocation between the social and the spatial. The book not only locates objects in the specificities of frontier spaces, but it also looks at how they are produced, circulated, and come to be intricately linked to a wide range of people, institutions, networks, and geographies. In the process, it explores how objects traverse and come to inhabit multiple historical, cultural, and geographical scales.

This book will be of interest to researchers and academics working in areas of history, social and cultural anthropology, Asian studies, frontiers and borderland studies, cultural studies, political and economic studies, and museum studies.

Part I
Commodities, resource frontiers, and state making

1
Trans-Indus Salt

Objects, resistance, and violence in the North-West Frontier of British India

Sameetah Agha

In 1930, grasping a fistful of salt-rich mud, Gandhi declared: ‘With this, I am shaking the foundations of the British Empire.’ While salt may have appeared an incredulous pick to both colonial observers as well as nationalist peers at the time, in retrospect Gandhi could not have picked a more powerful object. At the time, The Statesman wrote: ‘It is difficult not to laugh, and we imagine that will be the mood of most thinking Indians. There is something almost childishly theatrical in challenging in this way, the salt monopoly of the Government’ (Gandhi 2007). The Congress leadership too had been ambivalent, with Motilal and Jawaharlal Nehru being initially unpersuaded, and Gandhi’s ‘right arm,’ Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel was sceptical of salt, preferring a land revenue boycott (Gandhi 2010). Unlike tea, sugar, or opium – the other more exotically dramatic commodities of empire – salt, the poor man’s condiment, was a necessity. Gandhi himself explained his choice by stating, ‘Next to air and water, salt is perhaps the greatest necessity of life’ (Wolpert 2001). However, long before the Satyagraha the salt tax had already emerged as evidence of the injustice of the British Empire in India and become an object of colonial Indian nationalist resistance.

Early Indian nationalists mounted one of the first critiques of colonialism by focussing on the economics of empire.¹ Recently Aditya Mukherjee has pointed out that the achievement of Indian early nationalists in this respect is not appreciated despite the monumental work produced by Prof. Bipan Chandra as early as the 1960s (Mukherjee 2008). One of their critiques centred on taxation. Between 1880–1905 salt was the second most important source of revenue to the Government of India (Chandra 1966: 534). It was also a monopoly.² The oppressiveness of salt taxation was raised powerfully by leading nationalist figures such as G.V. Joshi and G.K. Gokhale. The colonial government in turn sought to refute these charges and justify their position. These debates produced a substantial literature that provides a rich source on the role of salt and its taxation in the British Indian Empire (Chandra 1966; Dutt 1904; Strachey and Strachey 1882).

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A large proportion of what is called death by famine is really murder by salt tax.

R.D. Rusden, published in the Mahratta , 21 July 1889

The monopoly and taxation of salt was a major source of revenue for the East India Company in India. In 1793 the Company derived a revenue of 800,000 pounds sterling from salt manufacture (Dutt 1904: 144). In 1806, the government established an agency for the control and management of salt which led to the doubling of its price becoming fixed at 70 rupees the garce.³ By 1844 the wholesale price had risen to 180 rupees and soon after to 120 rupees. In 1853 in a petition presented to the House of Commons the Madras Native Association said that as a result of the high price

either the people go without salt altogether or substitute an unwholesome article obtained from common earth impregnated with saline particles, which they manufacture at the risk of punishment; the procurement of salt other than that of the monopoly being prohibited under the penalty of fine and corporal punishment, inflicted at the discretion of the Collector or his Tahsildar.⁴

However in 1844, the revenue from salt had risen to 1,300,000 and by 1890 it was 80,943,550 pounds sterling (Dutt 1904: 145, 524) The revenue on salt was derived from a duty imposed on the manufacture of salt in India and from a duty on salt imported from Europe or from the Native States in India. The last rate imposed was 1.9 Rs per maund (varying unit of weight) in 1931 and remained in effect until April 1947.

Salt was not a solitary monolithic object in India, and there was not one uniform tax for the whole of British India.⁵ There were many sources of salt. For example, Bengal and Assam got their salt supply from salt imported from England. Madras and Bombay got their salt from the sea. The Native states of Rajputana obtained their salt from lakes or springs with salt occurrences. Taxation on salt also varied. In Madras the duty was collected under a monopoly in which salt was manufactured on behalf of the government, and sold at a price which gave profit equivalent to the duty. In Bombay, on the other hand, the duty was levied as an excise tax. In northern India the Punjab possessed ‘inexhaustible supplies of rock salt’ (Strachey and Strachey 1882: 216). Salt duties levied in different provinces were arbitrary and varied from time to time.⁶ While duty on salt imported by sea was fairly easy to obtain, the one on salt within the Indian provinces required the creation and maintenance of an inland customs line.

The customs preventive line was an actual material barrier, ‘2500 miles long, consisting of thorny trees and bushes, stone walls and ditches… guarded by an army of 12,000 officers’ (Dutt 1904: 524–525). Even while justifying colonial economic policies, Strachey and Strachey described it as a ‘monstrous system to which it would be almost impossible to find a parallel in any tolerably civilised country’ (Strachey and Strachey 1882: 219).

It consisted principally of an immense impenetrable hedge of thorny trees and bushes, supplemented by stone walls and ditches, across which no human being or beast of burden could pass without being subjected to detention and search…. It may be easily imagined what great and inevitable obstruction to trade, what gross abuses and oppression, what annoyance and harassment to individuals, took place.

(Strachey and Strachey 1882: 220) ⁷

One of the salts that the customs line was enforced to restrict was trans-Indus salt, rock salt that came from the mountains known as the Salt Range that lay beyond the Indus line in the Punjab extending into a region known as the North-West Frontier.⁸

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In the territory of Sopeithes there is a mountain composed of fossil salt sufficient for the whole of India.

Strabo, Greek geographer, 64 BC–24 CE ⁹

The ‘North-West Frontier’ was an imperial creation, its geography and terrain represented and given form through British colonial expansion in the nineteenth century. In 1898, amidst a heated debate in the House of Commons, Lord Roberts (1898) declared,

A Frontier, more than 1,000 miles in length, with a belt of huge mountains in its front, inhabited by thousands of warlike men, over whom neither we nor any other Power had control, and with a wide impassible river in its rear, seemed to me then, as it does now, an impossible Frontier.

Roberts’ view was characteristic of colonial representations of the region and its inhabitants – an ‘intractable,’ ‘barren,’ ‘mountainous’ terrain peopled by ‘independent’ though ‘barbaric,’ ‘warring’ tribes in ‘a state of permanent rebellion against the world.’¹⁰ In 1849 the British conquered Punjab and took possession of territories of the Sikh kingdom. The ‘North-West Frontier’ referred to the mountainous borderland area beyond the Indus that lay between the previously Sikh-held and now British administered territories and the kingdom of Kabul or Afghanistan. While the North-West Frontier has ‘no claim as a separate physiographic entity,’¹¹ its status as a frontier, was a continual project in the making that occurred largely within the context of imperial military expansion that in turn was met by the fiercest colonial resistance to be found anywhere in the British Empire.¹² Between 1849 and 1947 the area was the scene of perpetual violence and warfare – over a hundred punitive military expeditions known as ‘butcher and bolt’ or ‘burn and scuttle,’ named after the pattern of tactics the colonial military employed, were sanctioned against the different tribes. Armed colonial resistance was in great part responsible for the recurring orientalist tropes and images of the tribes (especially the Pukhtuns, the largest demographic group) as ‘barbaric,’ ‘bloodthirsty,’ ‘warring,’ and ‘recalcitrant.’¹³

The imagery and tropes invoked in conjuring the Frontier during the colonial period was one in which objects and resources were not emphasised (other than guns perhaps). The inhabitants were largely represented as predatory tribes that raided out of a lust for violence or out of necessity as their barren hills were scarce in resources.¹⁴ In 1897 the British were confronted with a formidable revolt. Tribes combined and revolted along the length of the frontier, from Swat to Waziristan. Military outposts were attacked and garrisons besieged. On 25 August 1897, the British lost the Khyber Pass, the great historic gateway to India, to the attacking Afridi tribesmen. The fall of the Khyber was seen as the ‘blackest day’ in the history of empire on the frontier. On the eve of the attack the Afridis sent a list of grievances to the colonial authorities. If the grievances were addressed, the lashkar (attacking party) gathering for the attack would retreat. One of their grievances was the increase of the salt tax.¹⁵

Although mentioned fleetingly in colonial and post-1947 historiography on the 1897 revolt, the salt grievance has been glossed over and not considered as worthy of investigation.¹⁶ However, the Afridi demand, asking for the salt duty to be lowered, is notable in that it runs directly counter to the prevailing idea of the colonial North-West Frontier as an area lacking in commodities and trade. In probing this grievance this chapter brings into play the missing history of salt in the colonial North-West Frontier and forces upon us a reorientation of the perception of the region as largely a colonial battleground by invoking other geographies – ones that are missing not only from colonial accounts but also in post-1947 histories of the Frontier as well as in Indian nationalist narratives around salt taxation.¹⁷

In ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age, Andre Gunder Frank problematises the notion of a ‘region.’ Furthering Lewis and Wigen’s identification of regions as partly a reflection of reality and in part ‘an arbitrary heuristic notational convenience’ he explains:

The bounding of the grouping depends on the purpose and changes from time to time, sometimes very suddenly. The regional ‘unit’ or ‘group’ may be an individual, a nuclear or an extended family, a village or town, a local ‘region,’ a ‘society,’ a ‘country,’ a ‘regional’ region (the circum-Mediterranean), or a ‘world’ region (the Americas, West Asia, South-east Asia, the South Pacific). The very mention of these examples illustrates how ill-defined (indeed ill-definable) and fluid these ‘regional units’ are and how arbitrary their identification is.

(Frank 1998: 61)

It is keeping in mind this arbitrariness and fluidity that I use ‘South Asia,’ ‘Central Asia,’ or the ‘North-West Frontier’ in what follows.

One of the richest sources of salt in South Asia came from a range of hills referred to as the Salt Range (see Figure 1.1). The range erupted from the Suleymani Mountains, crossed the Indus near Kalabagh, and terminated near the banks of the Jhelum River. This rock salt could be found cropping out in all directions or it lay near the ground surface ‘extending downwards in deep almost inexhaustible veins’ (Bruce 1863: 12). The Salt Range and the salt derived therefrom, was differentiated into cis-Indus and trans-Indus, given that the range crossed the Indus and extended on either side of the river.¹⁸ In 1863 Herbert Bruce described the salt as being excavated in such a pure state that it required no preparation beyond pounding it for direct consumption: ‘It is generally exported in blocks of transparent brilliancy, and consistency, and sometimes has a light reddish or blueish hue, in consequence of the proximity of iron’ (Bruce 1863: 12). The trans-Indus salt could be distinguished from the cis-Indus by their peculiar hue, the former being blueish and the latter reddish. On account of its purity, Bruce pointed that ‘this salt is held in great esteem, especially amongst the Hindoos of the Punjab, and it is said that according to their belief, no other kind of Salt should be consumed on certain days dedicated to religion’ (Bruce 1863: 12). While commenting that in some places in the North-Western Provinces there was a slight prejudice against the Punjab salts ‘owing to an erroneous impression, that it is productive of cutaneous disorders,’ he nevertheless went on to note that this salt could be found in the bazars of Rohilcund and Goruckpore (Bruce 1863: 12). In this chapter the focus is on the trans-Indus salt which was located in the Kohat district in the North-West Frontier and thus was also referred to as Kohat or even Bahadur Khel salt, the lat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: objects of frontiers
• PART I Commodities, resource frontiers, and state making
• PART II Networks, things, and violence
• PART III Regions, cultures, and connections
• Afterword: the flow of objects at the political edges: a postscript
• Bibliography
• Index