Kusunda people

The Kusunda or Ban Raja ("people of the forest"), known to themselves as the Mihaq or Myahq (< *Myahak), are a tribe of former hunter-gatherers of the forests of western Nepal, who are now intermarried with neighboring peoples and settled in villages.

In 1968 American anthropologist Johan Reinhard located a few of the last surviving Kusunda near Gorkha in Central Nepal, and in 1969 and 1975 he found further members in Dang and Surkhet valleys in western Nepal, collecting basic linguistic and ethnographic data (see references below). Shortly earlier, in about 1956, René Nebesky-Wojokowitz wrote a report after he was told by villagers of Kusundas conducting silent trade with Nepali farmers. The Kusunda were said to have brought a deer hunted recently and left it for a farm household with the unspoken expectation that the farmers would give the Kusunda farm goods. The Kusunda mainly hunted birds resting in trees at night with bows and exceptionally long (ca. 160 cm) unfeathered arrows, which were poorly suited for the hunting of land animals. Their custom of eating only the meat of wild animals extended until recent times. The Kusunda are followers of animism, though Hindu overtones may be seen in their religious rituals. According to the 2001 Nepal census, there are a total of 164 ethnic Kusunda of whom 160 were Hindus and 4 were Buddhists. The Nepali word Kusunda originally meant "savage", as the neighboring Chepang and other groups traditionally thought of them as savages.

Watters (2005) published a mid-sized grammatical description of the Kusunda language, plus vocabulary, which shows that Kusunda is indeed a language isolate. Nepali is now their language of everyday communication. The language is almost moribund, with no children learning it, as all Kusunda speakers have married outside their ethnicity. Only one speaker survives in Nepal, an elderly woman.

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