Two years ago, Gayatri Parameswaran and her husband Felix Gaedtke were looking forward to their journey from Berlin to Kathmandu when bad news came from Nepal. It was about the death of Gyani Maiya Kusunda, the protagonist of the Virtual Reality (VR) film the duo was going to make in the Himalayan nation. “Gyani Maiya died one day before our flight to Nepal,” recalls Mumbai-born Parameswaran about the tragedy that nearly killed their project.
Gyani Maiya, who lived in the Kulmor village of Dang district in western Nepal until her death in January 2020, was the oldest speaker of the Kusunda language, spoken only by a handful of people in the country. Unesco, which regularly publishes a list of vanishing languages, has classified Kusunda as ‘critically endangered’. “She was one of the last fluent speakers of Kusunda,” says Parameswaran, whose VR film was aimed at saving the endangered language from extinction.
Parameswaran and Gaedtke, multimedia journalists who call themselves ‘immersive creators’ (VR equivalent of film directors), had first met Gyani Maiya during a visit to Nepal 10 years ago. “She was an inspiring woman and had become an activist for Kusunda and started teaching the language to her grandchildren and others,” says Parameswaran, who decided to shelve the VR project following the setback. “But her family pushed us saying Gyani Maiya was looking forward to working with us.”
A year later, Kusunda premiered at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival in New York, winning its prestigious Storyscapes Award for excellence in storytelling. The 23-minute voice-driven VR narrative tells the tale of the indigenous language through Lil Bahadur, a village shaman, and his 17-year-old granddaughter.
The Kusunda language, which doesn’t have a script, is spoken by the ethnic Kusunda community who were hunters and gatherers that lived in forests until a few decades ago. “There are only 100-150 people who identify as being Kusunda today and only a handful of them speak the language. Mainly the older generation and middle-aged speak the language,” she says. It is hard to tell how old the language is, and it is categorised by linguists as a ‘language isolate’ as it’s unrelated to any other language family.
Parameswaran believes her film helps people show solidarity with the Kusunda community and their efforts for revitalising their language. The film is already showing results. After its Tribeca prize, NiaTero, a US-based non-profit working with indigenous people around the world, began a collaboration with the couple to save the language.
“We just ran the first part of the programme for language revitalisation,” she says. It includes a book for beginners in Kusunda and Nepali, and an audiobook. While the Language Commission of Nepal is giving scholarships to members of the Kusunda community to continue higher studies, Parameswaran and Gaedtke are sharing the prize money they won at the film festivals with the community to help them study and learn their language.
Parameswaran and Gaedtke (a German national), who stumbled on VR seven years ago, use immersive technology in the film to generate a voice-driven interactive experience inside a game engine. “People have to learn some words in the Kusunda language. The programme then reacts and the narrative moves forward,” says Parameswaran, who co-founded the Berlin-based immersive technology studio, NowHere Media, with Gaedtke, five years ago. “As a viewer, you say a total of 10 words during the film. In the end, even if you retain only one or two, it is quite a victory.” A dying language just got a voice.
Kusunda has been exhibited at the Venice International Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, Red Sea Festival etc
The voice-driven VR film centres around the indigenous community of Kusunda from Nepal
There are only 100-150 people in the world who can speak Kusunda