Skip to main content

Questions for the Dancing Girl

Dancing Girl


If I were to time-travel, one of the persons I would meet is the Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-Daro. I have a few questions to ask her. After all, she had the guts to stand stark naked with her chin up looking smug. Was she rebelling against something? How did she get away with that aplomb some four millennia ago? Were the men of the Indus Valley civilisation so broadminded as to accept such naked self-confidence of a pubescent girl?

   Well, I have some more serious questions for her or her people. Since I don’t know anyone else from that time, I’m just choosing the Dancing Girl. Some elder would suit me better. I have some serious questions to ask. For example, I would like to enquire about the writings discovered from the site of that civilisation. Some 400 characters have been identified in those writings. Each one looks like a word and none of them has any resemblance to Sanskrit, the classical language of India which was quick to lay claim to the Indus Valley civilisation.

   Many scholars have observed that the characters were some kind of proto-Dravidian scripts. Was the civilisation of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa more related to Dravidians than to Aryans or did it have no connection at all with either of them? The answer will lead to more questions. If the language was indeed proto-Dravidian, was the civilisation overrun by Aryans?

   My doubts are genuine. There are some evidences for the possibility of the Aryans having some kind of connection with the people of the Dancing Girl. For example, the word for ‘plough’ in Vedic literature is non-Sanskritic. The Aryans did not have a plough. The Harappans did. The Aryans must have learnt about ploughs from Harappans or their indigenous successors. Who are the people labelled contemptuously as Dasa in the Vedic texts? Are they the people or descendants of the Dancing Girl?

   One of the Aryan gods is the virulent Indra who is also called Purandara in the Vedas. Purandara means destroyer of forts. Did the Vedic people destroy the forts of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro?

   One more question I would love to ask the Dancing Girl is whether they had any sort of religion. Researchers have not been able to find any evidence of a religious place (temple) in Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro. Did the greatness of their civilisation owe something to the absence of gods among them?

   The answers might rewrite the history of my country with some shattering consequences.


Comments

  1. Pradeep NairJune 16, 2018 at 12:43 PM

    I am not quite familiar with Dancing Girl. But interesting observations. Also, ideas of morality were far different in those times, I think.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJune 16, 2018 at 8:17 PM

      Of course, even a hundred years ago the notions of morality were different. So obviously Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro must have had an entirely different moral outlook.

      Delete
  2. Da Ancient TimeJuly 12, 2023 at 3:08 PM

    The What Happened if Serbian Dancing Lady come to India is a mysterious figure who has been the subject of many online videos and memes. The videos show a woman dancing in a strange and erratic way, often in the middle of the night. Some people believe that the Serbian Dancing Lady is a ghost, while others believe that she is simply a disturbed individual.

    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

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 1

Inside St Francis Church, Fort Kochi Moraes Zogoiby (Moor), the narrator-protagonist of Salman Rushdie’s iconic novel The Moor’s Last Sigh , carries in his genes a richly variegated lineage. His mother, Aurora da Gama, belongs to the da Gama family of Kochi, who claim descent from none less than Vasco da Gama, the historical Portuguese Catholic explorer. Abraham Zogoiby, his father, is a Jew whose family originally belonged to Spain from where they were expelled by the Catholic Inquisition. Kochi welcomed all the Jews who arrived there in 1492 from Spain. Vasco da Gama landed on the Malabar coast of Kerala in 1498. Today’s Fort Kochi carries the history of all those arrivals and subsequent mingling of history and miscegenation of races. Kochi’s history is intertwined with that of the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British, the Arbas, the Jews, and the Chinese. No culture is a sacrosanct monolith that can remain untouched by other cultures that keep coming in from all over the world. ...
6 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

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 2

Fort Kochi’s water metro service welcomes you in many languages. Surprisingly, Sanskrit is one of the first. The above photo I took shows only just a few of the many languages which are there on a series of boards. Kochi welcomes everyone. It welcomed the Arabs long before Prophet Muhammad received his divine inspiration and gave the people a single God in the place of the many they worshipped. Those Arabs made their journey to Kerala for trade. There are plenty of Muslims now in Fort Kochi. Trade brought the Chinese too later in the 14 th -15 th centuries. The Chinese fishing nets that welcome you gloriously to Fort Kochi are the lingering signs of the island’s Chinese links. The reason that brought the Portuguese another century later was no different. Then came the Dutch followed by the British. All for trade. It is interesting that when the northern parts of India were overrun by marauders, Kerala was embracing ‘globalisation’ through trades with many countries. Babu...
10 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