Great Wall of India

It is assumed that in the Mariovo villages there was a man who had not heard of the Great Wall of China. Some claim that it was a farmer from a certain Polog village, and others point to a history teacher from Radoviš. Regardless of all this, the Great Wall of China is widely known in all its fantasticness, grandeur and visual attractiveness that attracts millions of tourists every year.

The ancient idea of ​​building long walls that, by their defensive nature, would be an obstacle to external aggressors - has two faces, one is the defensive one, and the other is the less known, unpleasant one, which is controlling the population that is inside, in the territory that is limited by the wall. The belt around Berlin, for example, the dramatic symbol of the Cold War, had an exclusively offensive task - to prevent people from leaving the bizarre creation known as the `German Democratic Republic`. These days, the self-proclaimed successors of the former Huns (Hungarians) are building a wall to protect themselves from an alleged invasion of Syrian refugees. A nice irony, if you know that the Huns were known as the two-legged Plague, prevented in their unannounced visits to various territories that had that misfortune - precisely by various defensive walls...

But no wall can compare to the completely unknown Great Wall of India, the creation of the giant corporation ``East India Company'' created for the colonial exploitation of the Indian subcontinent. What is so special about yet another wall, this time on the other side of the Himalayas?

Nothing, except that it was 4,000 km long. And that, unlike other walls, this one was - alive! In their relentless pursuit of more and more revenue, the company's leaders decided to increase taxes on salt, the most important product of the subcontinent on which the entire economy depended, along with the health of the subjects. Due to the climatic features, the population of those areas loses salt from the body through loss of body fluids and sweating and it needs to be replaced. Salt as a strategic product in those areas was the subject of attempts to monopolize by the company, a private entity with state prerogatives in collecting taxes, customs and excise. Having a private police and a private army, the company had long tried to increase the collection of duties and reduce evasion and smuggling.

The exact originator of the idea for the wall is unknown, although it has sometimes been attributed to the head of the Agra customs service - a certain George Sanders. Horticulture and the cultivation of hedges, walls and labyrinths in Britain has been brought to the level of an art. The tradition stretches back hundreds of years of experience and this experience was more than welcome in the cultivation of the Great Wall of India.

Around 1840, after a trial selection of many local plants - a few were chosen to be planted in stages from the foothills of the Himalayas in the northwest - to the Bay of Bengal in the southeast over a length of 4,000 km. Common features of the selected plants were thorns, density and speed of growth. The wall was 3 to 5 meters high and 2 to 4 meters wide, quite enough to discourage potential smugglers of salt and other commodities. One would expect that fire would be a logical solution for the destruction of this wall by smugglers, but one of the specifics of the plants that made up the wall was that they emitted huge amounts of white, far-visible smoke when burning. And that smoke would bring some of the 15 thousand soldiers, mercenaries of the East India Company and customs guards deployed along the wall - to the exact location of the place where someone would try to set fire to the wall.

This venture quickly bore fruit, the population was forced to travel through the `bottlenecks` along the wall, richly ornamented with customs facilities, measuring posts and armed guards. Soon, the revenue from taxes doubled, and later tripled. However, all this did not go without incidents, in various clashes between the guards and smugglers, 115 officials were killed and over 1000 were injured during the almost 30-year construction of the wall. And it grew and grew, maintained with the help of part of the tax money allocated for that purpose, the burned parts were replaced with newly planted thorns, hundreds of wells and rainwater tanks were dug in order to keep the monster alive.

As we know, a taxed man is a living devil, and so the then inhabitants of Hindustan became increasingly creative in avoiding the barrier, the memories of the great Mutiny of 1857 were still fresh and the famine and disease that hit Bengal culminated in 1876-78 when at least six million people died, partly as a result of the existence of the wall due to the unavailability of salt for millions of people. The figure is recognizable because it is equal to that of the Holocaust with the difference that in Hindustan such events were the rule that repeated itself every two to three decades, not the exception.

After the company's contract with the Crown expired in 1858, the management of the wall and its construction was taken over by the British colonial administration, the bloody British Raj headed by the Indian Viceroy. Faced with the described crisis situations, growing anger, mass desertion of the guards and the reduction of tax revenues, the Raj decided to abandon the wall in April 1879. Without maintenance, the wall thinned out over the next twenty years and then disappeared completely, remaining on the margins of memory, without the deserved historical notoriety that its ``colleague`` around East Berlin later had.

If the Great Wall of China is the largest structure built by human hands in history, then the Great Wall of India is certainly the longest ever erected, unique in its originality, tragedy and rapid oblivion...

(Roger Mortis, 088)