According to other thoughts Asur had settled in Jharkhand before one thousand B.C.
The Asurs (which in Sanskrit means “the demons”) is the only tribe in the world today with knowledge of how to extract iron from laterite rocks, while everywhere else it is extracted from hematite and magnetite. This tribe, with a total population of 7783 today, is believed to be the great builders of the ancient era.
A brief monograph series from 1993 by the Tribal Research Institute located at Ranchi with the Epoch Times, which mentions that the Asurs were originally from Illyria (ancient Greece), had adopted the culture of Babylon and Egyptian civilization, and gave this knowledge to Iran and India.“The Asurs of 12 B.C. were the greatest. They established the Mohenjodaro and Harappan Civilizations. They were tall and Herculean in their builds,”.
The word Asur occurs in a number of
places in the Rigveda, Brahamanas, Aranyakas, Upanishadas and Epics which
comprise the sacred literature of the Hindus. The Asur have been identified as
primitive tribe in Jharkhand State of India.
In the 1872 census — the first in pre-independent India —
Asurs came at the top of 18 tribes that were identified over 140 years later,
they are classified as one of 8 primitive tribes in the State, when they are
not mistaken as a sub-sect of the Munda tribe & their language, Asuri, is facing extinction, when not
mistaken as one of 14 Mundari dialects.
In 2013, the Ganesh
Devy-led People’s Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI), which was released in
State-wise volumes, sounded the statistical alarm bells on the state of our
languages. Almost 150 languages of the 780 spoken across India are on the verge
of disappearance.
As
a matter of fact, few among the 8,000-odd left of the Asurs, one of the eight
particularly vulnerable tribal groups (PVTGs) in Jharkhand. The Unesco
has listed the Asur language as “definitely endangered” with only 7,000
speakers left.
The UNESCO has already put Asur, Birhor and Korwa in its list of world’s endangered languages while Birhor has been tagged as “critically endangered” with just 2,000 speakers left.
In Jharkhand's hinterland Asur tribe loses its traditional skills to modernity as the new generation is no more interested in iron smelting or after a few people there will be none to practice a traditional technology for iron smelting, a craft perfected by forefathers but grown obsolete and economically unviable in an age of modern steel plants.
The lack of education and awareness that they need to pass their cultural beliefs to the next generation has been a big handicap for the tribe. Even the government has not done much to preserve their ethnic identity;
