Echoes From the Hills: Ecological Consciousness and Indigenous Resistance in Mamang Dai’s The Black Hill

Abstract

This paper offers an ecocritical reading of Mamang Dai’s Sahitya Akademi-winning novel, The Black Hill, highlighting its interweaving of ecological consciousness and indigenous resistance. The study examines 19th-century colonial encounters in Arunachal Pradesh from the perspective of the Adi and Mishmi communities. It embeds their spiritual and ecological worldview within a contested historical moment. The research employs a qualitative textual analysis, grounded in postcolonial ecocriticism and indigenous environmental perspectives. It explores how Dai’s narrative reconstructs tribal memory and oral history as forms of cultural and ecological resistance. It analyzes the novel’s depiction of land, forests, and rivers not as passive settings, but as sentient agents integral to shaping identity and history. Through characters like Kajinsha and the fictional Gimur, the narrative actively resists colonial silencing and revives indigenous epistemologies rooted in land, ritual, and oral memory. Findings reveal that The Black Hill functions as a powerful literary act of reclamation. Indigenous knowledge, language, and story converge in the novel to assert cultural sovereignty and environmental ethics in opposition to the exploitative logic of colonial capitalism. This study positions the novel as a vital eco-cultural archive that foregrounds the ethical entanglement of human and non-human worlds, advocating for justice and resilience among historically marginalized communities.