The Dynamics of Fixity and Freedom of Borders in Mamang Dai's The Black Hill

This paper explores Mamang Dai’s historical novel The Black Hill (2014) for the reconstruction of indigenous history. The paper focuses on the dilemmas of a changing relationship for the ethnic people to land and belonging under the impact of colonization. The paper argues while the author revives the Abor culture in the novel through storytelling, the narrative resists the dialectic of colonizer versus indigenous. Rather, it privileges blurred histories emerging from mobility around precolonial borders and the ensuing irreversible assimilation as an outcome of the colonial and missionary influence. In the process, the consciousness in the novel seems aligned with the critical border thinkers Gloria Anzaldúa and Walter Mignolo, as a decolonial project. While Dai’s novel privileges the self-representative border consciousness with the imperative of making the culture relevant in the past and future, the creative narrative is not confined to the theoretical framework.