Dancing Girl doesn’t need a modesty shawl, teenagers don’t need Mohenjo-daro photoshopped
She’s about 4,500 years old. But age hasn’t withered her, nor custom staled her infinite variety. The thing that she has in common with the much, much more youthful Mona Lisa is that when you meet her face to face, you’re wholly mesmerised. By her large eyes, flat nose, bodily vigour, trademark bangles…Her spell is all the more remarkable because the Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-daro is only about four, bronze inches tall. This suggests an out-of-time metallurgical mastery. It’s a reminder that we know so little about our cool Harappan ancestors. We haven’t even cracked their script. But the artefacts they’ve left behind are central to understanding them.
This is why Dancing Girl’s been in our school textbooks for decades. It’s how education instils civilisational pride. But suddenly, NCERT censored her image, smudging the bare torso, in an art textbook for Class 9. The regressiveness and irony were acute. Dancing Girl embodies a teenager “perfectly confident of herself and the world”, totally chill in her dress of bangles and a cowry necklace. But today’s teenagers will get corrupted by her truth, the new curriculum gatekeepers claimed fantastically. Too many of them are hellbent on outdoing Victorian colonialists, who tagged so much of our inheritance as embarrassing or illicit.
Every person has a body. If schools are pretending otherwise even in Class 9, that really sucks for students bang in the middle of a sex hormones spurt. Yes, they might still giggle and squirm at nakedness. But this is exactly where art can be super educational. A classroom discussion can explore why nakedness feels awkward in some cultures and unremarkable in others, how societies construct ideas of modesty, shame and beauty. It can teach students to really look, rather than merely react. So, it’s good that public outcry’s forced NCERT to reverse its photo-edit. And Dancing Girl is returning, bangles, confidence and all, exactly as she has stood for millennia.
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
