Cooch Behar Rajbari Palace Rajbongshi Culture West Bengal

Cooch Behar district in northern West Bengal contains the Cooch Behar Rajbari — a 1887 CE neoclassical palace modelled on Buckingham Palace built by Maharaja Nripendra Narayan of the Koch dynasty — and is the cultural heartland of the Rajbongshi people, the largest ethnic group of north Bengal and Assam whose Kamtapuri-Rajbongshi language and Koch tribal identity have sustained a distinct cultural geography across the Brahmaputra-Teesta river junction. The Koch Kingdom's heritage includes the Madan Mohan Temple and the annual Rash Mahotsav festival at Cooch Behar town, which features the Rash Yatra chariot procession drawing 50,000 devotees. The Rajbongshi cultural tradition includes the Bhawaiya folk music genre — a melancholic Kamtapuri folk song of separation and migration sung to the simple dh'ol-dhak percussion — that has spread through north Bengal and has produced nationally recognised singers. The Cooch Behar enclave exchange of 2015 between India and Bangladesh transferred 51 Indian enclaves within Bangladesh and 111 Bangladeshi enclaves within India, resolving a 65-year post-Partition geographical anomaly that had left hundreds of thousands of people in administrative limbo.