In the 1840s, in its enthusiasm for enforcing this line, the East India Company constructed a fourteen-foot-high, twelve-foot-thick thorn hedge on the western side of Bengal to prevent the entry of contraband salt. After the British government took over following the 1857 “mutiny,” as the uprising was labeled, the Customs Line grew until it snaked arbitrarily 2,500 miles across India from the Himalayas to Orissa.
