Salt

In Kanara

The study of the manufacture and trade in salt in Kanara was one of the tasks assigned to Buchanan. One could very well wonder why the East India Company would want to know about a commodity that was readily and cheaply available along Kanara’s coastline. The answer lies in the salt monopoly held by the East India Company which had profited enormously by controlling its manufacture and distribution in Bengal. In the 1840s, it yielded a revenue of £1,900,000 annually.[1] Its rigourous enforcement had disastrous consequences for Indians and industries that depended on salt.

Salt, Buchanan wrote, was made by a process similar to that used in Malabar.[2] The quantity, however, was less than the demand. Its manufacture involved the selection of some low ground that was covered by sea water at high tide but remained dry at low. A bank high enough to keep the tide out was built around it. Salt water was let it through a tunnel, formed from a hollow coconut tree, passing through the bank. The tunnel was shut after a sufficient quantity of water was let it. As the water evaporated, the soil became impregnated with salt. Brine was formed by filtering salt water through this saline earth. The brine was exposed to the sun in small plots, previously leveled and protected from water by a coating of clay and sand beaten together and rubbed smooth with a stone. Salt was manufactured only between 26th March and 23rd May. It took 28 hours for evaporation.

The government gave the salt-maker an advance of five pagodas[3] in cash, and another five in rice. The money was repaid, but not the rice. The sale-maker paid on an average a tax of 43 pagodas. The government, therefore, earned 38 pagodas (15 1. l6s. 3d.) for an ordinary salt-field at the manufacturing stage alone. The manufacturer sold his salt usually at the rate of 1120 seers a pagoda. A bushel therefore, including duties, costs less than 2.1/2 d.

Salt imported from Bombay and Goa sold for 3. ¼ d. and 2.1/2 d. a bushel respectively.

In East India Company controlled territories   

Salt, sodium chloride, is essential for people’s survival. Salt, in adequate quantities, is essential to keep the body from dehydrating, and normally comprises about 1/400 of body weight. The body attempts to maintain a constant level of salt concentration in the blood. If the body does not get enough salt, it reduces the excretion of salt in the urine and sweat. On a completely salt-free diet, the body steadily loses salt via the kidneys and sweat glands. It attempts to adjust this by accelerating its secretion of water so that there is a gradual desiccation of the body and finally death.

Salt, taxed relatively lightly prior to British rule, was heavily taxed under the British colonial administration, especially in the early years in Bengal. In 1765, Clive established the Exclusive Company. It was owned by the East India Company's senior servants, and operated for their personal benefit. It was given a total monopoly on salt. All production by others was declared illegal. This enabled the Exclusive Company to double the wholesale price of salt to Rs 2.47 a maund[4]. The Exclusive Company was forced to relinquish its monopoly on salt in 1768, and free manufacture resumed. The wholesale price fell to Rs 1.48. It included a tax of Rs 0.3 to the East India Company.

In 1780, Hastings brought salt manufacture under government control again. The wholesale price was fixed at Rs 2, of which Rs 1.1 to Rs 1.5 went to the government as a 'tax'. Farmers used their sub-monopoly to raise prices so that the tax collected by the government rose to Rs 3.25 a maund, where it remained until 1878. In Patna, Allahabad, and Lucknow it reached Rs 5 a maund. In 1823, adulterated salt was sold in many parts of the country for Rs 12 a maund.

In rural Bengal, in 1794, the basic agricultural wage ranged from half a rupee to one rupee a month. A labourer was also allowed to cultivate some of the employer's land which raised his monthly wage to between Rs 1.1 and Rs 1.6. The minimum family requirement of 16 kgs would have cost Rs 2.1/2. In 1788, this would have represented about two month’s income for an agricultural labourer. Most would have found this an enormous burden and would have reduced their salt intake to below these minimum levels. The resultant damage to their health would have been great.

The fate of these destitute Indians did not seem to be of concern the government.  Rather it spent an enormous sum of money to secure this source of revenue, best described in the words of an Englishman in the Indian Civil Service:  “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 civilized country. A Customs line was established which stretched across the whole of India, which in 1869 extended from the Indus to the Mahanadi in Madras, a distance of 2,300 miles; and it was guarded by nearly 12,000 men… It would have stretched from London to Constantinople…It consisted principally of an immense impenetrable hedge of thorny trees and bushes.”[5] 

This customs line was established in the 1840s to prevent free flow of goods between independent Indian states and British controlled territories. It consisted of a gigantic hedge, ten to fourteen feet in height, and six to twelve feet thick, composed of closely planted thorny trees and shrubs like babool (Acacia nilotica), Indian plum (Ziziphus mauritiana), karonda (Carissa carandas), nagphani (Opuntia), thuer (Euphorbia), thorny creeper (Guilandina bonduc), karira (Capparis decidua), and madar (Calotropis gigantea). Ridges were raised and trenches were dug to ensure both adequate drainage and rainwater collection. It was supplemented by stone wall and ditches, across which no human being or beast of burden could pass without being subject to detention and search. The custom line was finally abandoned on April 1, 1879.

Far from this great hedge, Brown quotes a case to which he was witness to a group of women in Malabar, who unable to buy salt to preserve their fish catch had gone at night to collect earth from the marshes to use instead, caught, beaten, and prosecuted “because their poverty had made them guilty of the crime of taking mud instead of salt, wherewith to cure their fish, and because they had, therefore, interfered with the Company's salt-monopoly.” The “cruel and oppressive” salt-monopoly had its baleful impact in other places far from the hedge. Brown writes that in the Deccan, 150 miles from the coast, the price of salt was at the very least three times higher than on the coast, where it is was already about “1000 to 1500 per cent above its natural price.” Here, people, after meeting their tax demands, had little money left to buy salt. While the more fortunate were able to consume about one-third of the quantity of salt consumed by the natives of the Konkan, the majority were forced to go altogether without it.

One of the consequences of the Afghan war of 1844 was the doubling of the price of salt. In Madras, a province with a 150 mile coastline where the making or the collecting of salt was totally prohibited, salt was imported from other provinces. In its bazaars, Brown was informed, as a result of the “odious and oppressive monopoly of salt”, a fanam bought just 2 seers (weight) instead of 5 seers as before. Unable to buy salt, poorer sections of the population collected “deleterious” earth from the salt marshes; those living inland went without it.

Brown cited English and European scientific that maintained salt was absolutely necessary for one’s health. Exclusion from the diet seriously affected the digestion and encouraged worms in the gut. Knowing this, certain criminals in Holland were fed solely on bread unmixed with salt so that they ended up by being eaten by worms generated in their own stomachs. Such a fate reserved for the worst criminals in Europe had been imposed on Indians by the East India Company in its unbridled pursuit of money.

The salt monopoly had disastrous consequences on the fishing industry. In Malabar, a fisherman’s catch that could not be immediately sold was left to rot “in order that the Company's salt-monopoly may flourish in full vigour.” Canned sardines brought by French ships from the Mediterranean sold at the rate of about Rs 10 for two dozen fish while local fishermen were forced to dispose of thousands of fish for just a rupee, to be used as manure because of their inability to buy salt to cure and preserve their catch.

The East India Company’s salt monopoly had annihilated the salt-fish industry. It had a similar effect on agriculture and livestock. Sea salt, used as manure for the rice and coconut crops cultivated along the coast, was now beyond the reach of the farmer. In addition, every coconut tree was taxed, and their produce (coconuts, oil, husk, coir, toddy etc) were additionally taxed. The salt monopoly had made sheep-rearing and cattle-breeding unprofitable as these animals also required a dose of salt in their diet. This in turn affected their use in agriculture and reduced soil fertility. To prove his point, Brown quoted from the Parliamentary figures of the Directors of the East India Company, which attested that the revenues of Madras, a country second to none in the world in the variety and value of its agricultural productions, had regularly declined in the last 40 years.

Brown concluded his remarkable expose with the words: “The recorded history of the world, ancient or modern, offers no parallel to such a government as this.”[6] 

References

Buchanan, F. 1807. A Journey from Madras through the Countries of Mysore, Canara and Malabar, Vol 3. London: T Cadell and W Davies.

Francis Carnac Brown. 1847. 'The Monopolies of the East India Company". In Free Trade & the Cotton Question with Reference to India. Appendix 12. London: T. Brettell.

Roy Moxham. 2001a. The Great Hedge of India. Robinson. London.

---2001b. “Salt Starvation in British India: Consequences of High Salt Taxation in Bengal Presidency, 1765 to 1878.” Economic and Political Weekly 36, no. 25 (2001): 2270–74 June 23, 2001

[1] Brown 1847: 96

[2] Buchanan 1807: 57

[3] Pagoda = Rs 4; Pound = Rs 9.92

[4] 37 kgs

[5] Moxham 2001a: 3

[6] Brown 1847: 108