Ethora

Ethora is a rural suburb of Asansol, Bardhaman district in the Indian state of West Bengal. It was a site of the first attempts at commercial coal extraction in the country.

History

In 1774, two employees of the East India Company, Suetonius Grant Heatly and John Sumner, proposed to establish six mines in an area which they defined as

within the space included by the river Adji to the north, the border of Burdwan to the east, the river Damooda to the south, and a circular line to the west, described from the town of Aytura in Pachete, at the distance of ten miles from Aytura, between the one river and the other.

A site at Ethora was among the six selected and was probably the first to operate.

According to the anthropologist Morton Klass, by 1963 it "had become a sleepy village of mud houses scattered among the ruins of once much grander buildings." However, until the independence of India from British rule in 1947 it had been of local significance as it was home to a zamindar successor to the Maharajah of Kasipur and to both religious centres and schools, although it had never possessed a market. Klass noted in 1978 that it was still a focal point of sorts for the villages that surrounded it because many Brahmin priests continued to live there, along with other castes with specialist occupational roles.

Demographics

In August 1921 the village suffered an epidemic and at that time the population was recorded as being 1902. The Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene reported that "the primary cause was neglected diarrhoea, due to eating indigestible food".

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