It is not always that we give the British credit for some of the beautiful things they left us. The demand for a colonial jail finally led to the creation of a major tourist attraction in Hazaribagh. A short thread on the interesting piece of history (1/n) 
During the 1830s several tribal communities like Kols and Santhals rose against the East India Company (EIC) rule in the Chotanagpur region. The foreign interference was getting increasingly unbearable (2/n)
The British, however, with their superior warfare knowledge, were able to squash most of these rebellions. The captured rebels were sent to Hazaribagh to be locked up since it was then the nearest British outpost (3/n)
But there was a problem ‐-- there were no jails in Hazaribagh. Hazaribagh back then was a small colonial town, built as an escape from the unwelcoming Calcutta weather (4/n)
The inmates were either housed in Dak Bungalows or company offices and this was a huge problem. Soon, plans were made to construct a penitentiary with two wards, it was to be called the Agency Jail (5/n)
To get materials like clay and rocks, a piece of land was dug near the proposed site. All that digging created a crater, the first of three (6/n)
After Hazaribagh became a district some years later, the number of native convicts grew, so there was a demand to extend the existing jail (7/n)
The extensions called for another round of excavations which left another crater near the first one, the second of three. The Jail started its operations in 1852 and five years later the mutiny happened. India came under the direct control of the Crown (8/n)
It was during that time the idea of having special penitentiaries for European inmates started doing the rounds, to maintain the racial order. Hazaribagh was chosen as the place for this special jail from the Bengal residency (9/n)
In 1862 Dr. Norman Chevers, the officiating inspector of jails found a spot for the new European penitentiary, on a gentle elevation, separated from the existing jail by a narrow stream (10/n)
The construction on the new European penitentiary was done by 1865, and it again left a crater just like the previous ones, the last of the three (11/n)
In 1866, an Irishman named John Martin Coates was posted in Hazaribagh as the Jail Superintendent. During his tenure, John quietly did a facelift of those massive craters and created the Hazaribagh Jheel, as we know it today (12/n)
The craters were along the sloping route of an ancient river, so during the monsoon, streams originating from villages on the higher ground like Noora and Kolghatti flowed into the surrounding areas (13/n)
Coates engineered the landscape in such a way that all those small streams ultimately ended up filling up the craters. He also fashioned the lakes in a manner that water from one flowed into the other and created a check dam on the last crater (14/n)
It is not known how much time it ultimately took to fill up the Jheel, but Coates might have not been there to see his project come to life. He died in 1896 of a heart attack. His last engagement was as the principal of Calcutta Medical College (15/n)
Source – Tales of Hazaribagh: An Intimate Exploration of Chhotanagpur Plateau by @MihirVatsa
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