If you have read Mamang Dai before, you don’t need a recommendation to read The Black Hill. You would have already bought a copy and read it at leisure during one of the long weekends we have had recently.
For Mamang Dai doesn’t write unputdownable books, she writes books that take you over and haunt you, books that seep into you and colour your soul, that wake your consciousness to other stories, other histories, and other ways of seeing and reading the world.
If you thought her The Legends of Pensam was an unusual novel, one that wove together legends, myths and histories, you must have also learnt to expect the unusual from Mamang Dai. Here is another such book—written with her trademark style, one that paints landscapes and mindscapes with such ease and finesse, that one flows into another.
Lives intersect, people pass each other and then meet in impressive and meticulous plotting, and histories collide and create stories that pass away through the mists of time.
And yet she talks about significant phases of history. This novel is about French missionary presence in what is now Arunachal Pradesh, and Assam. It is a story of colonial expansion, and missionary zeal and brave foolhardiness.
It is the love story of Gimur and Kajjinsha, the latter a historical figure who was hanged for the killing of Christian missionaries Father Krick and Augustine Bourry in the 1850s.
You can already see that the lives of Kajinsha and the missionaries collided, ending badly for all three, but how they met, what actually happened, the nature of their interaction, the lives of all these four characters, as chronicled in this book, is born of Mamang Dai’s imagination. And what a birth it is. She has the restless chieftain, Kajinsha, a man of the mountains, one who can sense his way to his destination, one who values most his independence, fall in love with a girl from a different tribe and place, Gimur. They elope to a life of love together, one that proves more elusive than anyone would think.
The missionary of love, Father Krick, lands up in their part of the world, in search of a route to Tibet, which he finds with the help of locals, who help him for reasons of their own.
His travels take him through Gimur’s village, and through Kajinsha’s country, and he is strangely fascinated by Gimur’s tribe and Gimur herself. They glimpse each other in sickness and in health, they challenge each other’s convictions, and they share fascination for the unknown, both in search of love.
The complicated relationships between people and tribes, the political machinations of tribal chieftains and colonisers, the changes wrought by the British presence, and the always strange and complex nature of love, make for a plot that sucks you in and spits you out at the end. We are all part of stories, stories that are significant, hugely important to us and to others who share our time and space, but who cares? Will the stories even survive the changes of time? Does it matter at all in a universe that has seen it all, seen it again and again, where the material never changes and can be found in all places at all times?
It is typical Mamang Dai that we read a historically located novel, one that makes us aware of places and times we are so distant from, filling in the blanks in our historical knowledge and imagination, and we end up philosophising about the nature of narratives in the grand and elemental story of the universe, full of incidents and accidents.