Images: The Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-daro and a postcard of a Dancing Girl of Jaipur from 1905 [color version].

In his new engaging and speculative book Ahimsa 100 Reflections on the Harappan Civilization, Devdutt Pattanaik writes of the famous so-called dancing girl figurine found at Mohenjo-daro:

"Her stance reminded British archaeologists of nautch girls they had encountered in India, so they described her as a 'dancing girl' though there is nothing about her posture that suggests dance. This is how the male gaze, the colonial male gaze works. The name has stuck." (p. 205)

Maybe. Sometimes things are what they seem. The great Urdu writer Qurratulain Hyder had a different opinion:

"Our society has been based on caste for thousands of years. The Mohenjodaro dancing girl whose bronze statue had been cast five thousand years ago was the mother of all these dancers. They way she stands with her hand on her hips–its a pose among our dancers even today. In the house of one of my women friends, I saw a large portrait of her grandmother. A very beautiful girl dresed in an embroidered sari, hand on her hips, in the same style as the Mohenjodaro dancing girl–as though she had leapt over five thousand years and reached Delhi. What amazing continuity!" (A Singular Voice Conversations with Qurratulain Hyder, Jameel Akhtar, Oxford, 2017, p. 87).