SIKHIM AND BHUTAN
Beddragong; but the respective owners of these mahals repudiated the claims, and they were dropped. In 1815 some dispute arose about frontier boundaries, and Babu Bishen Kant Bose was deputed to the Court of the Dharma and Deb Rajas to settle it. He has left an interesting report of the state of the country as he found it. From this year till 1825-26 there is no account of any communication with the Bhutanese.
The first Burmese War broke out at this time. We drove the Burmese out of Assam, assumed the government of Lower Assam, and in becoming possessors of this province we also found we had inherited the very unsatisfactory relations of the Assamese with the Bhutanese. The nature of these relations must be briefly explained in order to understand what follows. At the base of the lower ranges of the Bhutan hills there is a narrow strip of country, from ten to twenty miles in breadth, and extending from the Dhunseeree River, in Assam, on the east, to the River Teesta, or frontier of the Darjeeling district, on the west. This tract, which is by nature singularly rich and fertile, was known as the Bhutan Duars, or Passes. Eighteen passes entered it from the hills, each under the authority of a Jongpen, and attached to each jurisdiction was the portion of the tract lying below the pass, and bearing its name. Thus the whole locality came to be known as the Athara Duars, or Eighteen Passes. Of these Duars, eleven were situated between the Teesta and the Monass. The other seven were on the frontier of the Darrang (Goalpara) and Kamrup districts of Assam, and were generally called the Assam Duars, those bordering on the Bengal frontier being called the Bengal Duars. The Bhutanese had managed to wrest the Bengal Duars from the Mohammedan rulers of the country, probably soon after the foundation of the present Bhutan State. They never obtained absolute possession of the Assam Duars, but by their outrages and incursions they succeeded in forcing the Assam princes to purchase security by making over their Duars to the
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