Ritualization and Routinization: Discovering Liminal Spaces in Mamang Dai’s The Black Hill

Abstract

Derived from the Latin term “limen”, which means threshold, the term ‘liminality’ was first traced in the Dutch, German and French ethnographer Arnold van Gennep’s book Le Rites de Passage. Van Gennep examines the ceremonies occupying an individual’s “life crises” into three major distinctions rites of separation, transition and the rites of incorporation. If Gennep’s tripartite structure is studied very carefully and explored in the characters of Mamang Dai’s magnum opus The Black Hill, it can be very well observed that the Adi and the Mishmi tribes of Arunachal Pradesh, about whom Dai has penned down this novel are the same liminal beings, who are in the transitional status of being yet not being. Conferred with the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award for the novel, author Mamang Dai, basically scribbles the painful dilemma of three central characters- Gimur, Kajinsha and Father Krick- who have undergone a typical unsettling situation on one hand and an unlimited freedom on the other hand throughout their journey in the novel. The characters’ anxieties, frustrations and uncertainties are quite akin and can best be expressed through the impactful words of critic Bjorn Thomassen, who in his book Liminality and the Modern Living Through the In-Between writes that liminality is about human beings’ journey through various experiences and their reaction to change. So, placing the liminal theory on one side and the predicament of Adi and Mishmi villagers as portrayed in Dai’s The Black Hill on the other side, this paper is an earnest attempt to trace the liminal spaces that occurred in the daily routinized structures of Arunachali tribes in the dilemmatic historic period between 1847-1855.