Told in the hills
Eighteen doors and the war that closed them
Look at a map of the foothills between the Teesta and the Manas and you can still trace the old passes: Buxa, Bala, Chamurchi and others, each a river gap where traders came down from Bhutan. The word duar, or dooar, means door in Bengali and Assamese, and there were eighteen of them. Through these doors came wool, rock salt, musk and ponies from the hills, and down here went rice, dried fish and silk. By the eighteenth century Bhutan ruled most of the plains west of the Sankosh through its regional governors, the penlops, and their local officers.
In 1863 the British sent Ashley Eden to Punakha to settle border raids and the return of captives. The mission went badly; Eden later said he had been forced to sign a treaty under pressure, and the British disowned it. In late 1864 four columns of the Duar Field Force marched into the foothills. Buxa and the western passes fell quickly; at Dewangiri in the east the Bhutanese drove a British garrison out before it was retaken in 1865. The war was short, wet and costly for both sides.
On 11 November 1865 the Treaty of Sinchula ended it. Bhutan ceded the Eighteen Duars and a strip of hill territory east of the Teesta, around a fifth of its land, in return for an annual allowance that rose to ₹50,000. Within ten years the first tea garden of the Dooars was opened at Gazaldoba, and by 1881 there were 55. The forests you drive through today, the tea lines, the railway and even the district boundaries all trace back to that treaty.
Pinned to the board
Did you know
Duar means door: eighteen passes once led from these plains up into Bhutan, which is where the name Dooars comes from.
Jaldapara had only 14 one-horned rhinos in 1985; the March 2025 census estimated 331 there and 61 in Gorumara.
The Coronation Bridge over the Teesta at Sevoke was begun in 1937 to mark the coronation of George VI and finished in 1941.
Buxa Fort, a Bhutanese frontier post taken by the British, was used as a detention camp for Indian freedom fighters in the 1930s.
The Toto language of Totopara got its own script, created by community elder Dhaniram Toto, which entered the Unicode Standard in 2021.
