Cooch Behar district

• 1. Introduction

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  Cooch Behar district sits in the northeastern corner of West Bengal, India, where the flat plains of North Bengal are cut by seven rivers and centuries of layered kingdoms. The name itself tells a story: Cooch is a corrupted form of Koch, the name of the Koch tribes who once ruled here, and Behar comes from vihara, meaning land. Together they mean land of the Koches. But the people who live here today are the heirs to a far more tangled history than a name suggests.

  For over a thousand years, this territory changed hands between dynasties, empires, and colonial powers. It was a princely state until 1949. It holds a geographic curiosity once described as a chess game between kings. And it carries a demographic distinction found nowhere else in India: Scheduled Castes make up a majority of the population. How did a small district in Bengal end up at the center of so many remarkable stories? The answer begins with a tribe that rose to power in the rubble of a crumbling kingdom.

• 2. The Koch Dynasty

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  Biswa Singha came to power in 1515, becoming the first important ruler of the Koch dynasty. He built his kingdom on territory that had passed through the hands of the Khen dynasty, the Pathan Sultan of Gour, and local Bhuyan chieftains before the Koch tribe proclaimed itself Kamateshwar, meaning Lord of Kamata.

  Under Biswa Singha's son, Nara Narayan, the Kamata Kingdom reached its greatest extent. Much of that expansion was owed to Nara Narayan's younger brother, Shukladhwaj, also known as Chilarai. He served as a military general and led expeditions to push the kingdom's boundaries outward, eventually becoming governor of its eastern portion.

  After Chilarai died, his son Raghudev inherited the governorship of the east. Because Nara Narayan had no son, Raghudev was widely regarded as the heir apparent. That calculus shifted when Nara Narayan had a late child of his own. To settle the dispute, Nara Narayan anointed Raghudev as a vassal chief of the lands east of the Sankosh River, a region that came to be called Koch Hajo.

  When Nara Narayan died in 1584, Raghudev declared independence. The resulting split proved permanent. The western kingdom, ruled by Nara Narayan's own son Lakshmi Narayan, took the name Cooch Behar. Koch Behar aligned with the Mughal Empire and eventually joined the state of West Bengal. Koch Hajo's rulers aligned with the Ahom kingdom to the east, and that region became part of Assam.

• 3. Capitals, Invaders, and Shifting Ground

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  The capital of the Koch kingdom was not always where it stands today. Maharaja Rup Narayan, acting on the advice of an unknown saint, moved it from Attharokotha to Guriahati, now called Cooch Behar town, sometime between 1693 and 1714. That move placed the seat of power on the banks of the Torsa River, and the capital has remained in or near the same location ever since.

  Before that transfer was made permanent, the kingdom had already survived one dramatic invasion. In 1661, Maharaja Pran Narayan attempted to expand his territory. The Mughal subedar of Bengal, Mir Jumla, acting under Emperor Aurangazeb, responded by attacking Cooch Behar and taking the territory with almost no resistance. The town was renamed Alamgirnagar. Remarkably, Maharaja Pran Narayan recovered his kingdom within a matter of days.

  A century later, the threat came from a different direction. In 1772-1773, the king of Bhutan attacked and captured Cooch Behar. To push the Bhutanese out, the kingdom signed a defence treaty with the British East India Company on the 5th of April 1773. That treaty worked, but at a lasting cost: Cooch Behar became a princely state under British protection, a status it would hold for nearly two more centuries.

• 4. A Palace Modeled on Buckingham

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  The Victor Jubilee Palace was built in 1887 during the reign of Maharaja Nripendra Narayan, and its design drew directly from Buckingham Palace in London. The maharaja who commissioned it is remembered as the architect of modern Cooch Behar town.

  Nripendra Narayan's influence extended beyond architecture. In 1878, he married the daughter of Brahmo preacher Keshab Chandra Sen. That marriage is credited with triggering a renaissance in Cooch Behar state, connecting the royal family to the social and religious reform movements then transforming Bengal.

  The period under Nripendra Narayan brought Cooch Behar into a new relationship with the wider world. The palace still stands in Cooch Behar town and points toward what came after the maharajas: on the 12th of September 1949, Maharaja Jagaddipendra Narayan formally transferred all authority, jurisdiction, and power of the state to the Dominion Government of India. Cooch Behar became part of the state of West Bengal on the 19th of January 1950.

• 5. The Exclave Puzzle

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  Before 2015, any map of Cooch Behar would have shown something bewildering: the district was dotted with fragments of Bangladesh that sat entirely inside Indian territory, and India held pockets of land that sat entirely inside Bangladesh. The source of this tangle was, as one account describes it, the high-stakes card or chess games played centuries ago between two regional kings, the Raja of Cooch Behar and the Maharaja of Rangpur.

  The numbers were extraordinary. There were 92 Bangladeshi exclaves inside Cooch Behar, covering a total area of 47.7 km2. India held 106 exclaves inside Bangladesh, totaling 69.5 km2. The nesting went even deeper: twenty-one of the Bangladeshi exclaves sat within Indian exclaves, and three Indian exclaves sat within Bangladeshi exclaves.

  The most intricate example was a three-layer arrangement. The largest Indian exclave, Balapara Khagrabari, surrounded a Bangladeshi exclave called Upanchowki Bhajni, which itself surrounded a tiny Indian exclave called Dahala Khagrabari, measuring less than one hectare. This was one of the few counter-enclaves of a counter-enclave anywhere on earth. The India-Bangladesh land agreement eventually resolved all of these anomalies, dissolving a geographic inheritance that had persisted for centuries.

• 6. Who Lives Here

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  According to the 2011 census, Cooch Behar district had a population of 2,819,086, roughly equal to the nation of Jamaica at that time. Its population grew by 13.86% during the decade from 2001 to 2011. The district had a population density of 833 people per square kilometer.

  Cooch Behar holds a distinction unique among all 739 districts counted in that census: Scheduled Castes make up a majority of the population. The figure was 50.17%, or 1,414,336 people. No other district in India recorded that. Scheduled Tribes accounted for a further 0.64%.

  At the time of the 2011 census, 94.79% of the population spoke Bengali as their first language. Rajbongshi speakers made up 1.31%, and Hindi speakers 1.17%. Muslims were a significant minority, concentrated in particular blocks: Dinhata I at 36.98%, Dinhata II at 36.68%, and Sitalkuchi at 35.31%. Comparing 1941 and 2011 figures, the Hindu share of the population grew from 61.63% to 74.05%, while the Muslim share fell from 37.87% to 25.54%.

  The district's literacy rate was 75.49%, and only 10.27% of the population lived in urban areas, marking Cooch Behar as predominantly rural despite the presence of a historic town at its center.

• 7. Kalonunia Rice and Protected Identity

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  On the 2nd of January 2024, a rice variety called Kalonunia was awarded Geographical Indication status by the Geographical Indications Registry under the Government of India. The protection runs until the 11th of March 2034. The award made Kalonunia the 26th type of goods from West Bengal to earn a GI tag, and the third rice variety from the state, after Tulaipanji rice.

  Kalonunia is a common crop across Cooch Behar, Jalpaiguri, and Alipurduar districts, with some cultivation in Darjeeling and Kalimpong districts as well. The push to protect it came from the State Agricultural Management and Extension Training Institute at Narendrapur, which filed the application in March 2021. The Geographical Indication Registry in Chennai granted the tag three years later.

  The GI designation means that the name Kalonunia rice is now legally exclusive to rice grown in that region. It cannot be used by producers elsewhere to market a different variety. For a district whose history was shaped by kings fighting over territory, the formal legal protection of a local crop represents a quieter but durable form of territorial claim.