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

Country where humour died

Humour died a thousand deaths in India after May 2014. The reason – let me put it as someone put it on X.  The stand-up comedian Kunal Kamra called a politician some names like ‘traitor’ which made his audience laugh because they misunderstood it as a joke. Kunal Kamra has to explain the joke now in a court of justice. I hope his judge won’t be caught with crores of rupees of black money in his store room . India itself is the biggest joke now. Our courts of justice are huge jokes. Our universities are. Our temples, our textbooks, even our markets. Let alone our Parliament. I’m studying the Ramayana these days in detail because I’ve joined an A-to-Z blog challenge and my theme is Ramayana, as I wrote already in an earlier post . In order to understand the culture behind Ramayana, I even took the trouble to brush up my little knowledge of Sanskrit by attending a brief course. For proof, here’s part of a lesson in my handwriting.  The last day taught me some subhashit...
8 comments
Read more

Sunita Williams and Narendra Modi

An Indian artist celebrating Sunita Williams' return Prime Minister Modi has extended a cordial invitation to Sunita Williams. In a Letter dated 1 Mar 2025, Modi expressed India’s pride in her achievements and extended the invitation. “After your return, we are looking forward to seeing you in India. It will be a pleasure for India to host one of its most illustrious daughters.” Will Ms Williams accept the invitation? I have serious reservations. She won’t, in all probability. Her cousin was allegedly murdered by Modi’s men during the investigation of the 2002 Gujarat riots. The young generation in India are probably not aware of the 2002 riots in Gujarat orchestrated by Modi and his party for political mileage. In the last few years, whenever I raised the question in my classes, hardly one or two students out of the 200-odd ones were faintly aware of the riots. Inhuman violence was unleashed in Gujarat against the Muslim community after some Hindu pilgrims were attacked on...
6 comments
Read more

56-Inch Self-Image

The cover story of the latest issue of The Caravan [March 2025] is titled The Balakot Misdirection: How the Modi government drew political mileage out of military failure . The essay that runs to over 20 pages is a bold slap on the glowing cheek of India’s Prime Minister. The entire series of military actions taken by Narendra Modi against Pakistan, right from the surgical strike of 2016, turns out to be mere sham in this essay. War was used by all inefficient kings in the past in order to augment the patriotism of the citizens, particularly in times of trouble. For example, the Controller of the Exchequer taxed the citizens as much as he thought they could bear without violent protest and when he was wrong the King declared a war against a neighbouring country. Patriotism, nationalism, and religion – the best thing about these is that a king can use them all very effectively to control the citizens’ sentiments. Nowadays a lot of leaders emulate the ancient kings’ examples enviabl...
6 comments
Read more

Lucifer and some reflections

Let me start with a disclaimer: this is not a review of the Malayalam movie, Lucifer . These are some thoughts that came to my mind as I watched the movie today. However, just to give an idea about the movie: it’s a good entertainer with an engaging plot, Bollywood style settings, superman type violence in which the hero decimates the villains with pomp and show, and a spicy dance that is neatly tucked into the terribly orgasmic climax of the plot. The theme is highly relevant and that is what engaged me more. The role of certain mafia gangs in political governance is a theme that deserves to be examined in a good movie. In the movie, the mafia-politician nexus is busted and, like in our great myths, virtue triumphs over vice. Such a triumph is an artistic requirement. Real life, however, follows the principle of entropy: chaos flourishes with vengeance. Lucifer is the real winner in real life. The title of the movie as well as a final dialogue from the eponymous hero sugg...
4 comments
Read more

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
46 comments
Read more