From Text to the Earth: Exploring Mamang Dai’s The Black Hill (2014)

This article, with its intention to tease out the possibilities inhered in literary fiction, would try to understand if rethinking critical literary practices can create avenues for critical ecological thinking to evolve which could not only impact the reading of fiction as text but also reading the Earth as text. It will be argued that such critical literary practices could motivate mindful reading in the one who realizes the interconnection between humans and more-than-humans, so that it can lead us to understand reading as co-becoming, where the process of reading the text can impact reading the text of life, thereby initiating a process of healing. In this regard the paper would read Mamang Dai’s The Black Hill (2014), which is set in the Himalayan region of Arunachal Pradesh, to show how the narrative deals with the nuances of the human–mountain relationship which might become an impetus for text-to-earth thinking.