Skip to main content

Dancing Girl and Pakistan


As part of the increasing give and take exchanges taking place these days between India and Pakistan, the latter has demanded that the Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-Daro be returned to it.  

Dancing Girl
Dancing Girl is a bronze statuette excavated from the Mohenjo-Daro site before India and Pakistan became two separate nations.  It is just 10.5 centimetres high and is about 5000 years old.  The pubescent girl is stark naked except for a whole array of bangles and a necklace.  The posture looks like that of a dancer though she might have been confidently making a statement to her audience.  She holds her chin up and looks smug.  In short, she is a total contrast to what today’s Pakistan expects of a young girl.

Let us visit her briefly at the National Museum in New Delhi to ask her what she thinks of her threatened extradition.

“Oh, I think it would be horrible,” says DG losing all the panache that has graced her face for millennia.  “What will they do to me there?  Will they throw a purdah over me?  Will they lock me up in some closet?  They might even blast me to smithereens.”  DG shivers.

You understand her feelings and emotions.  She belonged to a culture in which people lived together as a cooperative community the kind of which cannot exist even in the most fantastic of human dreams today.  Mohenjo-Daro.

Mohenjo-Daro
Mohenjo-Daro was a dream.  You can read it in the radiance of her demeanour.  Mohenjo-Daro was a city of excellence built almost five millennia ago.  The Citadel had a large residential structure which could house about 5000 people.  It had two huge assembly halls and a number of public baths.  Then there was the Lower City.  There was the market.  An excellent drainage system.  There was love among the people.  Women were not discriminated against. It was a civilisation that was superior to most that came later. 

“Okay, I can’t ever go back to that, I know,” says DG plaintively.  “But why would I go to a place that is absolutely opposite to all that I ever lived in?”

You know you have no answers to her questions.  You know you live in a world that is strange even to you.  You don’t understand things like nationalism and jihadism.  You don’t understand why people create wonderful things only to bombard them in the name of some oddities allegedly living along with aliens up there somewhere. 

You bid adieu to DG.  You wish her good luck.  You know she cannot shed tears.  Thousands of years of existence is certain to make you hard.

  
Labels:

Comments

  1. AmitOctober 13, 2016 at 7:15 PM

    I wonder whether they have any good record of preservation. I never heard of it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalOctober 13, 2016 at 8:02 PM

      Nor have I. This present demand is just another retaliation.

      Delete
  2. SaketOctober 13, 2016 at 10:19 PM

    I like the way you made DG converse and made her put her point candidly.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalOctober 14, 2016 at 6:02 PM

      If DG had life and is she could talk... we would have learnt a lot about the pathetic drawbacks of our civilisation in comparison to hers, at least.

      Delete
  3. sunaina sharmaOctober 14, 2016 at 3:05 AM

    Even if she could shed tears, would they be of any value to anyone? Where women of flesh and blood suffer, what hope can be for a lifeless piece of art?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalOctober 14, 2016 at 6:02 PM

      There's no hope, Sunaina. Not only for her but even for others in that country.

      Delete
  4. Yogi SaraswatOctober 14, 2016 at 10:17 AM

    Very informative post . I was unknown about this grand piece of history but when Pakistan court ask about it then me too become curious to know about it and here is your post to tell all the things related to it . It is in National Museum , it is very near to me.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalOctober 14, 2016 at 6:04 PM

      I visited the National Museum a number of times along with students and friends. It's a place worth visiting especially since you are near it.

      Delete
  5. Amit AgarwalOctober 14, 2016 at 1:50 PM

    Her nonchalant pose in the dignity of nudity says it loud and clear that she will be an alien there:(

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Waiting for the Mahatma

Book Review I read this book purely by chance. R K Narayan is not a writer whom I would choose for any reason whatever. He is too simple, simplistic. I was at school on Saturday last and I suddenly found myself without anything to do though I was on duty. Some duties are like that: like a traffic policeman’s duty on a road without any traffic! So I went up to the school library and picked up a book which looked clean. It happened to be Waiting for the Mahatma by R K Narayan. A small book of 200 pages which I almost finished reading on the same day. The novel was originally published in 1955, written probably as a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi and India’s struggle for independence. The edition that I read is a later reprint by Penguin Classics. Twenty-year-old Sriram is the protagonist though Gandhi towers above everybody else in the novel just as he did in India of the independence-struggle years. Sriram who lives with his grandmother inherits significant wealth when he turns 20. Hi...
9 comments
Read more

The Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti...
31 comments
Read more

The Lights of December

The crib of a nearby parish [a few years back] December was the happiest month of my childhood. Christmas was the ostensible reason, though I wasn’t any more religious than the boys of my neighbourhood. Christmas brought an air of festivity to our home which was otherwise as gloomy as an orthodox Catholic household could be in the late 1960s. We lived in a village whose nights were lit up only by kerosene lamps, until electricity arrived in 1972 or so. Darkness suffused the agrarian landscapes for most part of the nights. Frogs would croak in the sprawling paddy fields and crickets would chirp rather eerily in the bushes outside the bedroom which was shared by us four brothers. Owls whistled occasionally, and screeched more frequently, in the darkness that spread endlessly. December lit up the darkness, though infinitesimally, with a star or two outside homes. December was the light of my childhood. Christmas was the happiest festival of the period. As soon as school closed for the...
14 comments
Read more

Schrödinger’s Cat and Carl Sagan’s God

Image by Gemini AI “Suppose a patriotic Indian claims, with the intention of proving the superiority of India, that water boils at 71 degrees Celsius in India, and the listener is a scientist. What will happen?” Grandpa was having his occasional discussion with his Gen Z grandson who was waiting for his admission to IIT Madras, his dream destination. “Scientist, you say?” Gen Z asked. “Hmm.” “Then no quarrel, no fight. There’d be a decent discussion.” Grandpa smiled. If someone makes some similar religious claim, there could be riots. The irony is that religions are meant to bring love among humans but they end up creating rift and fight. Scientists, on the other hand, keep questioning and disproving each other, and they appreciate each other for that. “The scientist might say,” Gen Z continued, “that the claim could be absolutely right on the Kanchenjunga Peak.” Grandpa had expected that answer. He was familiar with this Gen Z’s brain which wasn’t degenerated by Instag...
11 comments
Read more