Buxa Fort stands at 867 m on a forested spur above the plains. It was first a Bhutanese fort, built to command the Buxa Duar, one of the passes that linked the Bengal plains with Bhutan. Whoever held the duars controlled trade, and taxes, between the hills and the lowlands.
In the Duar War of 1864–65, British Indian forces occupied Buxa as part of their campaign to take the Bengal Duars. The Treaty of Sinchula, signed on 11 November 1865, confirmed British possession of the Bengal and Assam Duars, and the British rebuilt the fort in stone.
Remote and hard to reach, the fort became a high-security prison. It operated as a special jail from 1942 to 1947 and again from 1949 to 1951, holding political prisoners including revolutionaries from groups such as Anushilan Samiti and Jugantar. The Bengali poet Subhash Mukhopadhyay was held here and wrote of it as a prison in the clouds.
After the Tibetan uprising of March 1959, hundreds of monks fled to India, many from Drepung Monastery. They set up a monastic study centre and refugee camp at the old fort, known as Buxa Chogar, and lived and studied there until they were moved to Karnataka in 1971. Today a few walls, a memorial and the village remain.
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Legends are retold differently from village to village. Where a story is told locally rather than written down, we say so.
