The endangered Kusunda tribe now has only two surviving families. One lives in Gorkha and the other in Tanahun. In Dihi village, Tanahun, 46-year-old Indramaya Kusunda lives with her only daughter on the village’s outskirts. Since the death of her husband, Rajamama Kusunda, in 2018, Indramaya has been struggling to sustain the small family on her own.
To make ends meet, the municipality has employed her as a street sweeper. “A few months after my daughter was born, she fell from the roof,” Indramaya recalls. “I took her to Pokhara for treatment. Five days later, my husband collapsed and never got up again.”
Her daughter has had breathing difficulties ever since. “She gets tired easily, even while studying or helping with chores,” Indramaya says. “We spend around Rs 7,000–8,000 a month on her studies and treatment. But how much can I earn from sweeping streets?”
In 2004, the National Foundation for the Upliftment of Indigenous Peoples purchased one ropani of land in Dihitar and built a three-room zinc-roofed house for Indramaya’s family. But after two decades, the structure is falling apart. “The roof leaks whenever it rains,” she says. “Last year, I tried patching it with glue, but it didn’t work. I’m afraid one day it will collapse.”
Despite her hardships, she feels abandoned. “After Rajamama’s death, no one came to see how we are doing. Those who once promised help have all disappeared,” she says.
The struggle of Indramaya mirrors the broader existential crisis facing the Kusunda community. The only other Kusunda family lives in Terhakilo, Gorkha Municipality–11. Chet Bahadur Kusunda, the family head, lives there with his wife, two sons, two daughters-in-law, a married daughter, and four grandchildren.
They survive as daily wage laborers and own almost nothing. “After a journalist wrote about us, a neighbor donated three annas of land,” says Chet Bahadur. “We built a small house there, but apart from that, we have nothing, not even enough soil to fill our nails.”
He gestures toward a small cage beside his home. “We keep one or two chickens. If we let them roam, they graze in others’ fields.”
The family’s history is one of displacement and hardship. “We came here from Khoplang 45 years ago,” recalls Chet Bahadur. “I was ten when my father died. After that, my mother took us from one house to another, sometimes renting a room, sometimes working for shelter. There’s hardly a house in this village we haven’t lived in.”
He remembers chasing hope from place to place. “Once, my mother took us to Nawalparasi after hearing that the government would give land to squatters,” he says. “We returned empty-handed. Later, a kind neighbor gave us three annas of land. That’s all we have to this day.”
Now, the small one-story house built under the People’s Housing Program can barely fit his extended family. “There’s no land to build another house,” he says.
According to the 2021 Census of Nepal, there are only 256 Kusunda people left in the country. The two remaining Kusunda families in Gorkha and Tanahun are not just struggling with poverty; they are struggling for existence itself.
Without proper social security, land ownership, or sustained government support, the Kusundas, once a proud, nomadic hunter-gatherer tribe of Nepal’s mid-hills, are slowly vanishing from the country’s cultural and human map.
