Asur Erotic

The Asur carry a name that most of India knows from mythology, and knows as an insult. In Sanskrit tradition the asuras are the enemies of the gods, and Durga's killing of the buffalo demon Mahishasur is the centerpiece of the largest festival in eastern India. The Asur of Jharkhand tell it the other way around. Mahishasur is an ancestor and a king, and the days when the rest of the region lights up for Durga Puja are days when Asur villages hold mourning. This counter-reading is not a recent provocation. Something like it runs through Munda oral tradition, where the sun god Singbonga finally destroys the Asur because the smoke from their iron furnaces will not stop rising. Iron is the point. For centuries the Asur were smelters, working ore in small clay furnaces with hide bellows and selling blooms of metal to the blacksmiths of the Chotanagpur plateau. The furnace was handled as a living thing, fed and propitiated before a smelt, and the craft moved down family lines rather than being taught in the open. Cheap mill iron ended the trade over the last century, and the bauxite mining that arrived on the same hills took much of what remained.

Their country is the Netarhat plateau and the broken uplands around it, in Latehar, Gumla and Palamu districts, sal forest below and flat-topped highlands locally called pat above. They speak Asuri, a North Munda language of the Austroasiatic family, which makes them relatives of the Munda, Ho and Santal and linguistic outsiders to the Indo-Aryan Sadri and Hindi spoken all around them, both of which most Asur now use daily. Asuri speakers are counted in the thousands, and the work of writing the language, teaching it and publishing poetry in it belongs to the current generation rather than to any inheritance. The community divides into Bir Asur, Birjia and Agaria branches, and India counts it among the most vulnerable of its tribal groups, with a total population in the low tens of thousands. Religious life centers on Singbonga and on the sarna, the sacred grove at the village edge tended by a village priest, with Sarhul in spring and Karma in the monsoon as the fixed points of the year. Christianity has made inroads and Hindu practice presses in from every side. Since the 1990s the sharpest fact of Asur public life has been refusal: of a proposed army firing range across the plateau, and of the mining leases that keep coming back.