Told in the hills
From Bhutanese pass fort to political prison
Buxa Fort guarded the Buxa Duar, one of the eighteen passes between the plains and Bhutan, on the route that connected Bhutan and Tibet with Bengal. In 1772, after the East India Company intervened in Cooch Behar, Company troops took the fort; Bhutan got it back under the peace of 1774. During the Duar War of 1864–65 a British column occupied it again, and the Treaty of Sinchula in November 1865 confirmed British control.
The British rebuilt the fort in brick, granite and lime, and from 1930 to 1937 used it as a detention camp under the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act, holding revolutionaries far from their supporters. It was used again as a special jail in the 1940s and early 1950s. Rabindranath Tagore wrote verses for the detainees. In 1959, monks of Drepung Monastery who had fled Tibet set up a study centre, Buxa Chogar, here; they moved to Karnataka in 1971.
Pinned to the board
Did you know
Buxa Fort was used as a detention camp for Indian revolutionaries from 1930 to 1937, and later as a special jail.
From 1959 to 1971, monks of Drepung Monastery who had fled Tibet ran a monastic study centre called Buxa Chogar at the fort.
Buxa Tiger Reserve, created in 1983 as India's fifteenth tiger reserve, records at least 284 bird species.
