Dooars, India: Tea Forests and the Himalayan Foothills

Somewhere below Gangtok, the road stops climbing for good. The terraced hillsides of Sikkim give way to sal forest, then to tea bushes clipped flat as a lawn beneath rows of shade trees, and the mountains that filled every window for days become a blue wall along the northern horizon. This is the Dooars of India, a narrow belt of forest, river and tea garden at the foot of the Eastern Himalaya, and it carries Odyssey Traveller’s small group from the hills of Sikkim down to Gorumara National Park before the road turns toward Bhutan. It is easy to treat it as the flat stretch between two mountain destinations, but the Dooars explains a good deal about both.

Where is the Dooars in India?

The Dooars is the strip of forest and floodplain along India’s northern border with Bhutan, roughly 30 kilometres wide and some 350 kilometres long, running east from the Teesta River in West Bengal into Assam. It lies between the last ridges of the Himalaya and the wide plains of the Brahmaputra basin, at elevations mostly below 1,750 metres and in places under 100. The Sankosh River divides it into the Western Dooars, now largely the Jalpaiguri and Alipurduar districts of West Bengal, and the Eastern Dooars in Assam. The Western Dooars is the part the tour crosses.

The name is the clue to everything else. Dooars, or Duars, comes from the word for “doors” shared by Bengali, Assamese and several neighbouring languages, and it refers to the eighteen passes through which the hills of Bhutan open onto the Indian plains. For centuries these were the gateways through which a mountain kingdom traded with the lowlands: silk, dried fish and rice went up into the hills, while woollen cloth, rock salt, gold dust, musk, yak tails and hill ponies came down. Whoever held the doors held the trade.

Is the Dooars the same as the Terai?

No, though they are close neighbours and easily confused. Both belong to the same belt of grassland and forest at the foot of the Himalaya, but the Terai is the stretch west of the Teesta, around Siliguri and the Nepal border, while the Dooars begins east of the river. The distinction is partly historical as much as geographical: the Terai was never Bhutanese, and the Dooars was, which is why the two carry different names today.

The gateways of Bhutan: a short history of the Dooars

The Dooars did not always belong to anyone for long. In the sixteenth century much of it fell under the Koch kings of Cooch Behar and lower Assam, and when their kingdom split in 1581, Bhutan took advantage of the rivalry to push its authority down from the hills into the plains. By the eighteenth century Bhutanese governors, the Penlops, and their local officials were administering most of the passes, collecting revenue from farming communities who often spoke no Dzongkha and had little connection to the monastic fortresses far above them.

That arrangement ended with the Duar War of 1864–65. After years of border raids and a disastrous British diplomatic mission to Punakha, British Indian troops advanced on the Bhutanese forts guarding the passes. The campaign lasted about five months. Under the Treaty of Sinchula, signed on 11 November 1865, Bhutan ceded the Bengal and Assam Duars, along with the hill tract east of the Teesta that became Kalimpong, in return for an annual subsidy of 50,000 rupees. It amounted to roughly a fifth of Bhutan’s territory, and most of its best farmland. The British organised the western passes as the Western Dooars district, merging it into the new Jalpaiguri district in 1869.

The border that resulted still runs along the foot of the hills, and it explains why the modern road into Bhutan feels so abrupt. On the morning drive to the border, the tour travels through Indian tea country that was Bhutanese a century and a half ago; then, at Phuentsholing, the architecture, dress and language change within a few hundred metres, and the road begins its long climb into the mountains Bhutan kept.

Tea, forest and water

Tea on the plains

Once the British held the Dooars, they set about making it pay, and tea was the obvious crop. The first garden was planted at Gazaldoba, on the Teesta, in 1874, and within two years there were thirteen. The climate suited the plant in a quite different way from the hills. Where Darjeeling’s high-altitude gardens produce delicate, slow-grown leaf on steep terraces, the Dooars gardens sit on warm, low, heavily watered ground, often receiving well over three metres of rain a year. The result is a stronger, maltier tea, much of it destined for everyday blends rather than the auction rooms that prize a Darjeeling first flush.

The gardens look different too, and this is one of the pleasures of the drive down. Instead of bushes clinging to hillsides, the Dooars estates stretch across flat ground in clipped, waist-high rows, broken every few metres by the slender trunks of shade trees, with factory chimneys, workers’ lines and small temples set among them. In the late afternoon, with the hills of Bhutan behind them, they have a stillness the mountain gardens rarely manage.

Sal forest and riverine grassland

Between the gardens, the older landscape survives. The Dooars sits within the Terai–Duar savanna and grasslands, one of the most productive wildlife habitats in South Asia, where stands of tall, straight-trunked sal give way to grassland taller than a person along the rivers. This is country for large animals: Asian elephants, Indian one-horned rhinoceros, gaur, several species of deer, and in the larger reserves, tigers and leopards. A chain of protected areas runs along the foothills, from the Mahananda Wildlife Sanctuary, whose sal forest the tour passes through on the drive up from Bagdogra to Darjeeling, eastward to Gorumara, Jaldapara and Buxa.

Rivers that change their minds

Water shapes the Dooars more than anything else. The Teesta, Jaldhaka, Murti, Torsa and Sankosh all leave the hills here, and in the dry season most of them are modest streams winding across beds of pale boulders a kilometre wide. In the monsoon they fill those beds from bank to bank, move them, and occasionally abandon them altogether. Siliguri, on the Dooars’ western edge, receives around three metres of rain a year, the great majority between June and September. That seasonal flood is what renews the grasslands the rhinoceros depend on, and what makes the region so fertile, but it also governs when you can travel here, and it is one reason the tour’s departures fall in November and April.

The Dooars on the road from Gangtok

For Odyssey’s small group, the Dooars arrives on the sixth day of the 14-day journey through Darjeeling, Sikkim and Bhutan, after two days in Gangtok and its monasteries. The morning’s drive begins in the hills, on winding roads through forest and villages, and then drops steadily toward the plains. Somewhere on that descent the air thickens and warms, the vegetation turns from temperate to tropical, and the first tea gardens appear on level ground.

Travellers coming from Siliguri usually enter the Dooars by crossing the Teesta at Sevoke, over the Coronation Bridge, a single concrete arch built between 1937 and 1941 to mark the coronation of George VI and still regarded locally as the gateway to the region. Whichever road the day’s conditions favour, the effect is the same: within a few hours the Himalaya has turned from something you are inside to something you look at.

How long is the drive from Gangtok into the Dooars?

About five hours from Gangtok to Gorumara, according to the tour itinerary. The first half follows winding mountain roads; the second runs almost level through tea gardens and forest. It is essentially a seated travel day, with the afternoon free on arrival. The following morning, a further two and a half hours brings the group to the Bhutan border, followed by roughly five hours of mountain road up to Thimphu, a journey traced in more detail in our guide to crossing from Sikkim to Bhutan by road.

Communities and rural landscapes

The people of the Dooars reflect its layered history. Rajbanshi, Mech and Rabha communities farmed these plains long before the tea estates arrived, and Nepali-speaking families settled in large numbers from the nineteenth century onward. The tea gardens added a further layer: because local farmers were unwilling to work the new estates, planters recruited Adivasi labourers, largely Oraon, Munda and Santal people, from the Chota Nagpur plateau of what is now Jharkhand, often on harsh terms. Their descendants still make up most of the garden workforce, and their languages, festivals and dances remain part of Dooars life, as do the hardships of an industry that has seen several gardens close in recent decades.

Away from the estates, the Dooars is a landscape of rice paddies, areca and banana groves, and villages linked by lanes busier with bicycles than cars. Weekly markets, or haats, draw people from surrounding villages to trade produce, cloth and livestock. The tour’s day here gives a chance to see this rural life of the Bengal plains, and in the evening the group is treated to a cultural performance, a fitting close to a day spent between two worlds.

Gorumara and regional conservation

The group’s night in the Dooars is spent beside Gorumara National Park, one of the region’s best-known protected areas. Gorumara has been reserve forest since 1895 and was declared a wildlife sanctuary in 1949 because of its breeding population of Indian one-horned rhinoceros. Today it covers about 80 square kilometres of sal forest and riverine grassland on the floodplains of the Murti and Jaldhaka rivers, with watchtowers looking out across the grassland.

The park’s success is also a lesson in the pressures facing the whole region. Tea estates, farmland, highways and a railway line now crowd the corridors elephants have used for generations to move between forests, and conflict between people and wildlife is a real concern for Dooars villages. Small reserves such as Gorumara depend on those corridors staying open; without them, each park becomes an island.

Is the Gorumara safari included on the tour?

No, it is an optional extra. The afternoon at Gorumara is free, and those who wish can sign up for a car safari through the park’s grasslands, where rhinoceros or gaur may be seen, though sightings are never guaranteed. Travellers who prefer to rest can stay in the hotel garden. The park closes to visitors during the monsoon, roughly June to September, so both the November and April departures fall within its open season.

What is the weather like in the Dooars in November and April?

Warm and mostly dry in November, hotter and more unsettled in April. At Siliguri, on the Dooars’ western edge, November days average around 26°C with nights near 15°C and very little rain. By April, days reach about 31°C, nights stay near 20°C, and afternoon thunderstorms become more frequent as the monsoon approaches. Either way, the Dooars is markedly warmer than Darjeeling or Thimphu, so this is a day for light layers packed alongside the warmer clothing the rest of the tour requires.

Reading the landscape on the way to Bhutan

What makes the Dooars worth understanding, rather than simply driving through, is how much it compresses into one day. In the space of a morning the road falls from Gangtok, at around 1,650 metres, to plains barely a hundred metres above sea level; by the following evening it has climbed again to Thimphu, well over two thousand metres up. Along the way the traveller passes from Buddhist hill country to Bengali and Adivasi villages, from terraced cardamom and hill forest to tea gardens and sal forest, and from a frontier that Bhutan lost to the one it kept. Seen that way, the Dooars is not an interval between destinations but the hinge on which the whole itinerary turns.

For a small group of 6–14 travellers, it is also a welcome change of pace: a day of warm air, open views of the mountains ahead, and an evening among the forests before the long climb into Bhutan. To see how this stretch fits alongside Tiger Hill, the monasteries of Sikkim and the dzongs of Paro and Punakha, explore the Tour of Darjeeling, Sikkim, and Bhutan, or read our day-by-day guide to the full route across the Eastern Himalaya.