Buxa Fort and the Duar War of 1864–65

The first clash with the British came through Cooch Behar, the Koch kingdom just south of the Dooars. In 1772, with Bhutanese forces involved in a succession struggle there, Cooch Behar asked the East India Company for help. Company troops pushed the Bhutanese back into the hills and took Buxa Fort. A treaty in 1774 restored the fort and the Dooars to Bhutan in return for peace on the border.

For the next seventy years the frontier stayed tense. Raids and counter-raids, disputes over runaway subjects and captives, and arguments about revenue from the Duars were common. In 1841 the British annexed the Assam Duars and agreed to pay Bhutan an annual sum in return. The Bengal Duars, including Buxa, stayed Bhutanese.

In 1863 the government of India sent Ashley Eden to Bhutan to settle the border disputes and secure the return of captives. The mission reached Punakha in 1864 and went badly. Eden later said he had been insulted and forced to sign an agreement under pressure, which the British government disowned. In November 1864 Britain declared war and annexed the Bengal Duars by proclamation.

Four columns of what was called the Duar Field Force marched into the foothills that winter. Buxa and the western passes were taken quickly. In the east the fighting was harder. Bhutanese forces, led among others by the Trongsa Penlop Jigme Namgyal, father of Bhutan's first king, drove the British garrison out of Dewangiri in early 1865 before it was retaken. Disease, heavy rain and difficult ground hurt both sides. By mid-1865 the British held the passes, and Bhutan agreed to talk.

The treaty was signed at Sinchula, in the hills above Buxa, on 11 November 1865. Bhutan ceded the Bengal Duars and the Assam Duars for good, along with a strip of hill territory east of the Teesta that included Kalimpong. In return the British agreed to pay Bhutan an annual allowance, beginning at ₹25,000 and rising in stages to ₹50,000, as long as Bhutan kept the treaty. The treaty also covered extradition of criminals and free trade between the two sides.

Kalimpong, ceded under this treaty, was joined first to the Western Duars and then, in 1866, to Darjeeling district. The Treaty of Punakha in 1910 raised the allowance to ₹1,00,000 and placed Bhutan's foreign relations under British guidance. After 1947 the 1949 Indo-Bhutan treaty took that role.

The Dooars changed fast after 1865. The forests were surveyed and reserved, the first tea garden opened at Gazaldoba in 1874, and by 1881 there were 55 gardens. Workers came from Chota Nagpur, Nepal and elsewhere, and a railway followed. Much of what a visitor sees today, from the tea lines to the forest boundaries, dates from the years after the treaty.

The war moved a lot of land. The Bengal Duars became the Western Duars of British India; the hills east of the Teesta became the Kalimpong subdivision; and the Assam Duars, already annexed in 1841, were confirmed as British. Bhutan lost its richest farmland and most of its trade routes to the plains. The annual allowance, paid in rupees, became an important part of Bhutan's state income in the decades that followed.

Some of it later came back. Dewangiri, the hill post in the east where the Bhutanese had fought hardest, is now Deothang in Bhutan's Samdrup Jongkhar district. Under the 1949 treaty between India and Bhutan, India returned about 32 square miles of territory around Dewangiri and raised the annual payment to ₹5,00,000. The plains, however, stayed in India: they are now divided between Jalpaiguri, Alipurduar and Cooch Behar districts of West Bengal and the Assam districts to the east.

For visitors, the result is visible on any drive along the foothills. The border between India and Bhutan still runs along the foot of the hills, where the old duars met the mountains, and towns such as Jaigaon and Phuentsholing sit on either side of it, on the old line where plains traders met people from the hills.

The British rebuilt Buxa Fort in brick and stone, and after the war it became a quiet frontier post. Its isolation later made it useful for another purpose. From 1930 to 1937 it was a detention camp for Indian revolutionaries held without trial under Bengal's emergency laws, kept far from their supporters in Calcutta and the districts. It was used again as a special jail in the 1940s and early 1950s. Rabindranath Tagore wrote verses for the detainees, which are remembered at the fort.

In 1959, after the Dalai Lama fled Tibet, the Indian government gave the fort and its barracks to refugee monks. Monks of Drepung and other great monasteries ran a study centre here, known as Buxa Chogar, keeping their teaching and debate traditions alive in the heat and damp. In 1971 they moved to new settlements in Karnataka, where the rebuilt monasteries stand today.

The fort is inside Buxa Tiger Reserve, about 15 km north of Rajabhatkhawa. Cars stop at Santalabari, and a stony path climbs through forest to the fort, about an hour on foot. Little remains: sections of wall, the gate area and a memorial to the detainees. The setting and the story are the reason to come. Above the fort, the Drukpa village of Lepchakha has a chorten and a wide view over the plains on a clear day.

Go with a local guide who can tell the fort's story; most of the ruins carry no signs. Pay the forest entry at Rajabhatkhawa and carry water, as there is little on the path.

Combine the fort with a night at Jayanti, about an hour away by car, or with Chilapata and Jaldapara further west. From Alipurduar Junction a car to Santalabari takes about an hour. If you walk up in the morning, you can be back at the road by lunch and at Jayanti by mid-afternoon.

• Best months: October to April; the path is slippery and leech-ridden in the monsoon.
• Time needed: half a day for the fort, a full day or an overnight with Lepchakha.
• Cost: forest entry about ₹50–200 per person and a guide about ₹500–1,000 per group, indicative 2026.
• Rules on entry and homestays inside the reserve change; check current status before you travel.