What Mohenjodaro’s Dancing Girl figurine tells us about the prehistoric civilisation

The over five-feet tall adaptation drew flak from several quarters for distorting the original figure’s form. The 4,500 years old bronze figurine, just 10.5 cm in height, is dark and completely in the nude with the exception of multiple bangles and a necklace. However, the adapted mascot has fairer skin, and is dressed in a bright pink blouse and an off-white waist-coat.

The Ministry of Culture insists it is not a transformation or a new look to the original piece of art, but just “an inspired craft work”. “The idea of introducing the mascot, especially through a toy, was also to bring forth the importance of Museum merchandise and in turn, self-sustainability of these cultural institutions,” officials told The Indian Express.

They add, “The International Museum Expo 2023 Mascot was a stylised and contemporised life size (5 ft as compared to the original 10 cm) figure inspired from the Dancing Girl of the Sindhu Saraswati Sabhyata. The Mascot was also to be interpreted as a modern-day Dwarpal or Door Guardian to usher audiences into the experience of Expo. The traditional craft of Channapatna toys, also protected by a GI (geographical indication) tag, was used to create this mascot.”

Discovering the Dancing Girl

The Indus Civilisation (3300-1300 BC with its mature stage dated to 2600-1900 BC), also known as the Harappa-Mohenjodaro Civilisation, had been long forgotten till its discovery was announced in 1924. While sites and artefacts from the civilisation were in discussion since the early 19th century, it was not until the 1920s that they were correctly dated and recognised as part of a full-fledged ancient civilisation, much like the ones in Mesopotamia and Egypt.

After the initial recognition as an ancient civilisation, a spate of excavations were conducted in the two major sites that were known till then – Harappa and Mohenjodaro. The Dancing Girl was discovered in one such excavation in 1926, by British archaeologist Ernest McKay in a ruined house in the ‘ninth lane’ of the ‘HR area’ of Mohenjodaro’s citadel.

Even though Mohenjodaro and Harappa became part of Pakistani territory after the Partition, the Dancing Girl remained in India as part of an agreement. Today, the bronze figurine sits in the National Museum of India as artefact no. HR- 5721/195, enthralling visitors in the museum’s famous Indus Civilisation gallery, often referred to as its “star object”.

Some descriptions

Over the years, the Dancing Girl has been an object of fascination for archaeologists and historians. Of particular interest has been the pose the woman strikes and what that means.

The figurine has “the pleasing stance of a young and spirited woman”, historian Romila Thapar wrote in The Penguin History of Early India: From Origins to AD 1300 (2002).

“This young woman has an air of lively pertness, quite unlike anything in the work of other ancient civilisations,” historian AL Basham wrote in his classic The Wonder that was India (1954).

Mortimer Wheeler, director of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) between 1944 and 1948, described the figurine as his favourite. “A girl perfectly, for the moment, perfectly confident of herself and the world. There’s nothing like her, I think, in the world,” Wheeler wrote.

John Marshall, Director-General of the ASI from 1902 to 1928 who oversaw the initial excavations in Harappa and Mohenjodaro, described the figurine as “a young girl, her hand on her hip in a half-impudent posture, and legs slightly forward as she beats time to the music with her legs and feet”.

Inferences that can – and cannot – be made

As Marshall’s description suggests, it is the pose that the figurine strikes that has led historians to believe that the woman depicted was a dancer. However, there is no other evidence to support this claim.

Recent work on the issue has suggested that the “dancer” label came from readings of Indian history from later dates, when court and temple dancers were commonplace. American archaeologist Jonathan Kenoyer wrote in Art of the First Cities: The Third Millennium B.C. from the Mediterranean to the Indus (2003) that the dancer label was “based on a colonial British perception of Indian dancers, but it more likely represents a woman carrying an offering.”

In 2016, a paper by Thakur Prasad Verma in Itihaas, the Hindi journal of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), claimed that the figurine was in fact a depiction of Hindu Goddess Parvati. The paper attempted to tie the Indus Civilisation to Vedic Hinduism. This claim has been dismissed by most historians who say that there is simply no evidence to say with certainty who the Dancing Girl depicts or whether there was any worship of Hindu Gods in the Harappa-Mohenjodaro Civilisation.

What can be inferred from the bronze statuette, though, is the degree of sophistication of Harappan artistry and metallurgy. The Dancing Girl is evidence of the civilisation’s knowledge of metal blending and lost-wax casting – a complicated process by which a duplicate sculpture is cast from an original sculpture to create highly detailed metallic artefacts.

Moreover, the very existence of a figurine such as the Dancing Girl, indicates the presence of high art in Harappan society. While art has probably been around since the very beginning of human existence, the degree of its sophistication indicates a society’s advancement. The Dancing Girl by all appearances is not an object built for some utilitarian purpose – artists took great time to create an artefact of purely symbolic, aesthetic value.