Buxa Fort is located at an altitude of in the Buxa Tiger Reserve, in the Kalchini CD block in the Alipurduar subdivision of the Alipurduar district in West Bengal, India. It is from Alipurduar, the nearest town. The King of Bhutan used the fort to protect territory connecting Tibet with India, via Bhutan. During the unrest in the annexation of Tibet by the People's Republic of China, hundreds of displaced persons used the abandoned fort as a place of refuge.
History
Buxa was a Bhutanese frontier fort commanding the Buxa Duar, one of the passes connecting the Bengal plains with Bhutan. In 1772, following Bhutanese intervention in Cooch Behar and the removal of its ruler, members of the Cooch Behar royal family sought military assistance from the East India Company. Company troops under Captain Jones expelled the Bhutanese forces from Cooch Behar and subsequently captured the forts of Daling, Chichacotta and Buxa. Under the peace agreement concluded with Bhutan in 1774, the Company restored the territories that it had occupied in Bhutan.
British occupation
During the Duar War of 1864–1865, British Indian forces again occupied Buxa as part of their campaign to take control of the Bengal Duars. Buxa was successively occupied by one of the two western British columns by the end of 1864. Troops maintained by Cooch Behar under Captain Hedayat Ali assisted the British during the war, but after its conclusion the Bhutan Duars were annexed to British India, making British territory contiguous with Cooch Behar on its northern frontier. The Treaty of Sinchula, signed on 11 November 1865, confirmed British possession of the Bengal and Assam Duars.
The British subsequently reconstructed and expanded the fort, which was later used as a high-security prison and detention camp. Subhamay Dutta's research shows that Buxa functioned as a detention camp under the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1930 during 1930–1937, and later operated as a special jail from 1942 to 1947, and again from 1949 to 1951. Dutta’s research further establishes that Subhas Chandra Bose was not detained at Buxa Fort. He reconceptualises Buxa not merely as a ‘fort,’ but as a detention camp and an instrument of colonial control.Dutta, Shubhamay, "Ordering the Imperial Policy of Bengal Detainees: An Analysis of Buxa, Hijli, Berhampore, and Deoli Detention Camps" It was the most notorious and unreachable prison in India after the Cellular Jail in Andaman. Nationalist revolutionaries belonging to the Anushilan Samiti and Yugantar groups, such as Krishnapada Chakraborty, were imprisoned there in the 1930s. Poet Rabindranath Tagore wrote a poem to lift the morale of the prisoners kept in this forest prison.Forward Bloc leader and ex-law minister of West Bengal, Amar Prasad Chakraborty, was also imprisoned at Buxa Fort in 1943, as were some communist revolutionaries and intellectuals like Nirad Chakraborty, Shibshankar Mitra and Satish Pakrashi. The poet Subhash Mukhopadhyay was also imprisoned there in the 1950s. He gave a vivid description of this jail in one of his stories, “Prison in the Clouds” () in his Bengali book ().
Tibetan refugee crisis In March 1959, Chinese troops tasked with quelling the Tibetan uprising moved aggressively against the Drepung Monastery; only a few hundred of over 10,000 monks escaped to India via Bhutan. These Drepung monks, and other refugee monks and nuns representing diverse Tibetan orders, first set up a monastic study center and refugee camp known as Buxa Chogar, on the grounds of the jungle-bound former prison camp.
In 1966, the Indian Ministry of External Affairs was alerted to the conditions of the Buxa refugee camps, and it became apparent that the Tibetan refugees would have to be relocated to a more hospitable place. Initially reluctant, a message from the Dalai Lama, urging them to think of the future and to strive for sufficiency, and the option of settling near other Tibetan refugees, convinced the monks to move. In 1971, the monks left Buxa Fort for new locations at Bylakuppe and Mundgod in the state of Karnataka.
Geography
Location Buxa Fort is located at .
Area overview Alipurduar district is an extensive area in the eastern end of the Dooars in West Bengal. It is undulating country, largely forested, with numerous rivers flowing down from the outer ranges of the Himalayas in Bhutan. It is a predominantly rural area, with 79.38% of the population living in rural areas. The district has one municipal town and 20 census towns; 20.62% of the population lives in urban areas. The scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, taken together, form more than half the population in all the six community development blocks in the district. There is a high concentration of tribal people (scheduled tribes) in the three northern blocks of the district.
Note: The map alongside presents some of the notable locations in the subdivision. All places marked in the map are linked in the larger full screen map.
Trekking The following routes are popular among tourists and nature lovers – Santalabari to Buxa Fort Buxa Fort to Rovers point Santalabari to Roopang valley Buxa Fort to Lepchakha Buxa Fort to Chunabhati
Buxa Fort picture gallery
References