British occupation

The British, invited by the Cooch King, intervened and captured the fort. It was formally handed over to the British on November 11, 1865 as part of the Treaty of Sinchula.^[1] The British reconstructed the fort from a bamboo wood structure to a stone structure. The fort was later used as a high-security prison and detention camp in the 1930s;^[2] 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. 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” (Bengali: মেঘের গায়ে জেলখানা, romanized: Mēghēra gāẏē jēlakhānā) in his Bengali book (Bengali: আমার বাংলা, romanized: Āmāra bānlā).

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. These expatriate monks, representing diverse Tibetan orders, first set up a monastic study center and refugee camp in Buxa Fort, on the grounds of the jungle-bound former prison camp.^[3]

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.^[4]

Location

Buxa Fort is located at 26°45′17.86″N 89°34′49.04″E.

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.^[5][6][7]

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.