The road runs flat through green paddy and betel-nut palms, past tin-roofed houses and tea stalls. Then the trees part, and there it is: a long palace of arched loggias under a tall central dome, like a villa from Florence that took a wrong turn.
Cooch Behar Palace, the Rajbari, was built in 1887 for Maharaja Nripendra Narayan, in the style of the Italian Renaissance. It covers over 51,000 square feet, and its dome rises about 124 feet above the ground. Today it is a museum run by the Archaeological Survey of India.
The Koch kings
The Koch dynasty rose in the early sixteenth century, and under Nara Narayan, with his brother Chilarai as his general, it became one of the great powers of the north-east. After Nara Narayan’s death in the 1580s the kingdom split, and the western half became the state of Cooch Behar. It made terms with the East India Company in the 1770s and stayed a princely state, ruled by its own Maharajas, right up to independence.
The Maharaja who split the Brahmo Samaj
Nripendra Narayan (reigned 1863–1911) built the palace, and the town around it, as a modern capital. His marriage made history too. In February 1878 he married Suniti Devi, daughter of Keshab Chandra Sen, leader of the reforming Brahmo Samaj. The Brahmos had campaigned for a minimum age of marriage, and both bride and groom were below it. Keshab’s followers were outraged, and that same year the dissenters left to found the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj.
The palace
The palace is a long, two-storey brick building with arcades along both floors and a high central hall under the dome. It was once partly three storeys high, but the great Assam earthquake of 1897 brought the upper floor down. The museum inside shows the royal family’s photographs, furniture, costumes and objects of the Koch court.
The end of a kingdom
After independence, the last Maharaja agreed to merge Cooch Behar with India in 1949, and it became a district of West Bengal in 1950. The palace passed to the state, and from there to the ASI.