Noelle Kadar And Curators Himali Singh Soin, David Soin Tappeser On Salt Lines And A Forgotten Colonial Border

The Inland Customs Line, also known as the Great Hedge of India, was a 4,000-kilometre barrier built by the East India Company and expanded under the British Raj to enforce a colonial monopoly on salt. Roughly 2,500 kilometres of it was a living hedge of thorny shrubs, planted and maintained to prevent the movement of untaxed salt across the subcontinent. At its peak in 1869, nearly 14,000 workers patrolled its length. The British abandoned the Line in 1879, after seizing control of Sambhar Lake from the princely states of Jaipur and Jodhpur, and the hedge has since vanished almost entirely from both landscape and memory, dissolving the way anything organic eventually does, rather than being torn down or preserved.

Salt Lines, an exhibition curated by Hylozoic/Desires, comprising Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser, excavates that erased history. Presented by Jaipur Centre for Art (JCA) in collaboration with RMZ Foundation, the exhibition opened on July 3, 2026, and runs through August 9 at JCA within the City Palace complex, following an earlier presentation at the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Mumbai. At its centre is The Hedge of Halomancy, a video work built around Mayalee, a historical courtesan believed to have worked in Sambhar and possibly Jaipur, whose fictionalised story runs through the exhibition's textiles, salt prints and sculptural works. JCA was founded in 2024 by HH Maharaja Sawai Padmanabh Singh and contemporary arts specialist Noelle Kadar. Robb Report India spoke with Kadar and with curators Himali and David about the exhibition.

Robb Report India (RRI): What made Salt Lines feel like the right fit for JCA and the City Palace specifically?

Noelle Kadar (NK): Salt Lines centres on the Inland Customs Line, a border built and enforced under British colonial rule to protect the East India Company's monopoly on salt. There's an obvious relevance in content that has to do with Rajasthan and its history. We have been in conversation with Himali and David about this exhibition for over a year, and we all felt that bringing it to Jaipur Centre for Art would carry a deeper relevance here.

RRI: How does hosting a show about colonial extraction and erasure sit within a former royal seat? Does that tension inform how you're presenting the work?

NK: What we love most about how Himali and David approach this history is their attention to the barrier as a living thing, not just an administrative line on a map. Much of it took the form of a hedge, thorny shrubs, wild plants, insects, birds, and snakes that made it their home over generations. Many of those same plants had medicinal or practical value the East India Company never registered; they saw only a wall, not an ecosystem. There's real tenderness in how the curators hold that contradiction: a barrier built through classification and control, inhabited all along by a nature that refused to be simplified or tamed. You see it directly in the materials: the block-printed textiles hanging on JCA's verandah are made using salt and natural dyes drawn from those very plants and insects, and they're two-sided, one face an orderly grid of colonial botanical classification, the other a chaotic swarm of termites, the same insects that actually ate through the hedge and undid the order the Empire tried to impose. Installing that in JCA, which sits inside the City Palace complex, which has its own history of navigating colonial pressure at that time, turns the Palace's own history, in a small way, into part of the material.

RRI: With a second collaboration with RMZ Foundation now confirmed, how do you see these institutional partnerships shaping JCA's long-term direction?

NK: Salt Lines is the first of two confirmed collaborations with RMZ Foundation, the second, a studio intensive for young artists, is set for August and September. JCA is a young institution, which sits under the greater umbrella of The City Palace Museum. We rely on institutional partnerships to support our programming, to build depth and visibility, and honestly, it would be impossible for JCA to programme the way it does without this kind of institutional and partnership support. RMZ Foundation's commitment to Himali and David has been remarkable, supporting Salt Lines from Mumbai to Jaipur, and the curators' separate presentation at the Venice Biennale.

RRI: With the residency programme and Artists' Cinema running alongside Salt Lines, how does this exhibition fit into JCA's broader vision for the summer season?

NK: Exhibition-making and programming can be as much a matter of practicality as curatorial intent. The residency is an essential part of what JCA does, but it doesn't always align with what's on view in the exhibition space. We'd long wanted to bring Salt Lines to JCA, and this summer that finally came together: our film programme, Artists' Cinema, now in its second edition, runs afternoon and evening screenings from July 3 through August 9, and the screening area hosts the film component of Salt Lines during the day. Between our exhibition space, our residency, and the co-presented Sculpture Park, it's not necessary that everything connects. Sometimes it does, but what's necessary is that each is strong on its own.

RRI: As JCA is still a young institution, what do you hope audiences take away from pairing historical excavation like this with the City Palace's own history?

NK: We hope people leave looking a little closer at the world around them, that's what this work does for us. The barrier at the centre of Salt Lines was known as the Great Hedge of India, and because it was organic, living plants, not stone or brick, it's almost entirely vanished. That's what makes its erasure different: this wasn't a monument torn down or a history deliberately buried; it disappeared the way anything living eventually does, organically. There's something precious in that, in the stories that survive outside of buildings and monuments, the ones that depend on being remembered rather than being preserved in stone. We keep coming back to the word tenderness for how Himali and David handle that. The salt prints hanging in the gallery use salted paper printing, a 19th-century photographic process from the exact era of the Customs Line itself, fitting, given salt was the commodity this whole history is about, and here it's also the literal chemical fixative in the images themselves. But the pictures are entirely new, staged at Sambhar Lake today, and in some cases generated using AI, imagining a living and incredibly impactful structure that no longer exists at all. If audiences walk away treating that history as something alive and close, rather than sealed behind glass, we think we've done our job.

RRI: What first led you to the story of the Inland Customs Line, and what compelled you to revisit this largely forgotten chapter of history through your curatorial practice?

Himali & David (H&D): We usually stay with a single element, ice, salt, radiation, for many years across different places and mediums till they intersect with history, climate, myth, magic, and erotics. We first stumbled upon a mention of the hedge when conducting research for our first salt-related work, Namak Nazar (2023). Even though it was only a paragraph long, the idea of a planted hedge running across the subcontinent captured our imagination. The fact that no one we knew had heard about it, despite the central role of the British salt monopoly in Indian independence, piqued our interest, and suspicion, and marked the beginning of a two-year journey across archives and landscapes. For us, the hedge becomes a powerful symbol at so many levels: it epitomises the slow violence of colonial extraction, a partition of land that begets further partitions, the weaponisation of nature, but also the porosity of imagined borders, the ultimate disobedience of flora and fauna, and the healing potential hidden amongst it all.

RRI: Your curatorial approach often moves between rigorous archival research and speculative storytelling. How do those two approaches inform one another during your process?

H&D: To paraphrase Italo Calvino: fiction participates in the truth. The very idea behind Hylozoic/Desires is to question our habitual ways of seeing the world, to see our world as much more animate and vibrant than modernity has had us believe, and trying to dream ourselves into the crevices, cracks, and beings so we may know differently. While we often think of archives as factual representations of the world, they too are fictions, in that they are selective and unidirectional. In turn, this patchiness of record not only shapes our views of the past, but also our understanding of the present, especially in an age of AI, where deviations from predominant narratives are progressively filtered out. In Salt Lines, we try to explore, inhabit, and re-populate the gaps and omissions in the archive, giving voice to the voiceless actors, drawing connections to medicinal properties of weaponised plants, or by imagining alternative trajectories of histories that swing to the side of justice. We felt it was crucial to tell the story of the customs hedge before it was completely erased from landscape and memory, but in doing so, we felt it was important to also include voices that had never been considered in the hedge's history in the first place.

RRI: Salt Lines was first presented in Mumbai and is now being shown at JCA in the City Palace, Jaipur. Has bringing the exhibition into this new historical context changed the way you think about the work or how you hope audiences engage with it?

H&D: There are two threads to the work, the salt tax and the hedge, and the fictional world of the courtesan who refuses the colonial bind. When we presented the project first at Somerset House in London, it felt wildly in situ, as the building once housed the National Tax Office. When it was shown at Bhau Daji Lad, it reverberated with their colonial economic botany collection. Now, at JCA, we are able to highlight the nearby Sambhar Lake and Mayalee, the courtesan's story. Jaipur was one of the primary reasons for the hedge's existence. Sambhar Lake, under shared control of the princely states of Jaipur and Jodhpur, was one of northern India's primary salt sources. As it shared a border with the Bengal presidency, the potential influx of untaxed salt from Jaipur was thus one of the principal reasons the British established the customs hedge. The protagonist of the central video work, The Hedge of Halomancy, is based on the figure of a historical courtesan, known as Mayalee. The scant historical records of her life suggest that she was primarily based in Sambhar, but we believe it is very likely that she would have worked in Jaipur too. She may even have performed at the City Palace on occasion, wandering the same halls our exhibition now occupies.

RRI: In your curatorial text, you reference Mayalee and The Hedge of Halomancy. How do those narratives extend into the sculptures, installations, and material language of Salt Lines?

H&D: The Hedge of Halomancy forms the core around which the exhibition is structured, but different strands of the custom hedge's multilayered story yielded a variety of other works in different shapes and forms. Every medium carries its own connotation and history. Working with archives that lacked visual representations, for example, the manipulated image, video as well as photography, embodied the deceptive air of reliability of colonial records. Using the 19th-century photographic technique of salt prints to develop the images, salt itself becomes part of the work's materiality. For namak halal/namak haram, the textile installation at the entrance of JCA, itself a small fragment of a much larger installation shown at Somerset House in London, we used block-printed textiles. Whereas the blocks mimic the stamps of colonial bureaucracy, some of the dyes are extracted from plant species that constituted the historical hedge. In other words, every medium somehow connects to the story that we try to tell through it. Mayalee's costume is made from contemporary waste that washes up on the shores of the salt pans. In this way, she is not only a figure that perhaps woos the English Commissioner of the hedge, Allan Octavian Hume, by whispering her prophecies across the hedge, but she also becomes a contemporary symbol of climate change. The gown, however, refers to a Victorian gown. Is it possible that while she may have incited the uprising of 1857, when parts of the hedge were burnt down, she may have actually turned to the other side? Our curatorial approach lies in these translucent spaces that invite a viewer's own interpretation.

RRI: The exhibition speaks about ideas of non-duality and liberation. How do these concepts take physical form within the works, and what do you hope visitors experience through them?

H&D: Like salt is an acid and a base, we believe that everything is this and also that. Liberation is found in revealing the redemptive hidden amid the oppressive. Salt Lines excavates the forgotten, and slowly violent, history of the customs hedge to look at its impact and ripples into present-day neocolonialisms. At the same time, it insists on the porosity, unwieldiness, and, ultimately, impermanence of such borderlines and identities. Within the exhibition, we move from British salt tax's political ramifications, ending with the Dandi march, to its ecological impacts on birds, tigers, or snakes that feature in the British archives, and in our film, who were not only able to effortlessly pass through this barrier, but found a whole world within. Like the three-dimensional crystal of salt that acts as a magical talisman in The Hedge of Halomancy, we aspire to guide the audience through a series of revelations and metamorphoses.

Salt Lines is on view at Jaipur Centre for Art, City Palace, Jaipur, from July 3 to August 9, 2026, presented alongside Artists' Cinema 2026.