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.