Key Person of Kusunda Tribes (Gyani Maya Sen)

Gyani Maiya Sen

Date of birth: 1994 B.S. 

Place of birth: Jungle, Rolpa

Father: Bal Bahadur Sen

Mother: Gokuli Pun

Gyani Maiya Sen was born somewhere in the jungle-covered hills of western Nepal in 1937 AD (1994 V.S.) to Bal Bahadur Sen and Gokuli Pun. She is the second of the three daughters. She spent the first fifteen years of her childhood in the jungle while her father was alive. After her father died she moved with her (Magar) mother and sisters to a maternal uncle’s home, which was not a Kusunda-speaking household (they spoke mainly Nepali in this home). The eldest sister was Ghani and married in Salyan. The youngest daughter died while she was still young. Gyani Maiya had two brothers, Dam Bahadur Sen and Bhim Bahadur Sen, but they, and her older sister, are dead now.

Gyani Maiya was married to a man of Magar ancestry in Jura of Masina Village Development Committee (VDC) in Rolpa district (the location of her maternal uncle’s home). Later, when her husband went to India for the job she also migrated to Lamahi in the south of Dang district, near the Indian border. After a while, she moved to Kulmore, an area close to Lamahi and ran a hotel there feeding people who came down from the high hills of Rukum, Rolpa, Salyan, Pyuthan, etc. to purchase things like salt and kerosene from the Koilabas transit village on the border with India. Later she left her hotel and went to India to work twice. She still lives in Kulmore, with her son, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren. Kulmohar is a tiny village in Dang district. It’s close to a small river with only a handful of houses there. Gyani Maiya Sen lives here. She knows the Kusunda language, cultural practices, and livelihood patterns of Kusunda when they were in the jungle. She explains that she works in the rice fields, takes care of her grandchildren, and spends time in the forest. But no one understands her. “There are few from the Kusunda tribe who live here. But nobody speaks the language. The new generation doesn’t want to speak the language. They are not interested. They make fun of the language, and that it doesn’t make sense!”

She was the first person to move to Kulmore, and originally had a lot of lands there, but subsequent arrivals have taken much of the land and planted mustard fields. On the remaining land, she raises a cow, two sheep, and too many chickens and ducks.  “When we lived in the forests, we would stay in a group, in the cave. I really liked that. When we first entered the village, I was sad to leave the forest behind. In the beginning, it was very difficult. We faced many troubles. We had problems adapting to the new life here.”Gyani Maiya and her family had to leave the forests because of the loss of their habitat due to deforestation. Gyani Maiya has two daughters and one son. All of them are married. Recently, the government of Nepal has built a house for her, her husband had died. Before we met her, she used to survive by earning money breaking rocks in the nearby river, Arjun Khola (Donohue 2013).

Gyani Maiya Sen is the language heritage because she is the only person still alive in Nepal who fluently speaks the Kusunda language. The unknown origins and mysterious sentence structures of Kusunda have long baffled linguists. As such, she has become a star attraction for campaigners eager to preserve her dying tongue. Ms Sen – despite her age – still ekes out a living as a stone-crusher. But outside of the workplace, she finds that she is increasingly in demand from linguistics students wanting to learn the Kusunda language with her help. The Kusunda tribe to which Ms. Sen belongs is nomadic. As hunters and gatherers, they live in huts in the jungle and carry bows and arrows to hunt wild animals. While the males of the tribe hunt, women and children stay at home and search for wild fruits.

According to her family, there isn`t any change in her lifestyle. Now, she has a son (Prem Bahadur Pun), six grandchildren and daughter in law. They told that she should love the forest for her living. She thought that jungle is a place where she would do whatever she liked, for example, eating food and moving in the forest. According to her son and daughter in law still, her behavior is like the past when she was in the forest. Gyani Maya spent her whole life in the forest. On that day her family lived Jurmasina forest of Rolpa. Later they migrated to the Balkot forest in Argakhachi now and then they came and went into human society as her mother was 9 years old when her father Ball Bahadur Kusunda died.

Gyanimaya with her family members

She lived with her mother Gokuli, near the Jungle of Rolpa. She said, they migrated in dang since 2024. On that day they lived together making group 10-15 and spent their life a week and 15 days in the same place. She memorialized that they didn`t have their own house, where they moved, and went that was her home. The home was covered by wood and dry leaves. They used to eat wild fruits, wild animals, birds, and wild roots and asking with villagers. They run their life very difficultly. 

Gyani Maiya doesn`t use to eat and drink milk, curd, and energetic food even she lives in a community nowadays said her son Prem Bahadur Pun. His mother`s behaviors is still wild. She doesn`t live comfortably if she doesn`t go to the forest now and again added his son. Prem Bahadur said that his mother believes in Dhamijhakri (shamanism) so, she doesn`t like to go to the hospital and take medicine also. According to him Gyani Maiya hadn`t gone hospital. When she sick we call "dhamijhakri". He checked her than she feels well. Gyani Maiya doesn`t like to stay in mass. She scolds her daughter in law so, her daughter in law feels surprised. She added that her mother in law doesn`t like to stay in the mass of people and she feels odd on her to behave and again added that she never scolds her but, they don`t have a close relationship.

As Gyani Maiya Sen nears the end of her life she worries that her final words may be the last ever spoken in her mysterious mother tongue. Until recently, there were two other native speakers of Kusunda, Puni Thakuri and her daughter Kamala Khatri, but Puni died two years ago and Kamala migrated to India for work, leaving Sen the sole surviving native speaker. 

She died on January 26, 2020.