A centennial gift for the naked dancer

For a hundred years, she danced with naked abandon, and the world of antiquarians enjoyed watching her.

- R. PRASANNAN

Replicas of her dancing pose were made in thousands, and sold to art-lovers and souvenir-hunters who kept them on their mantelpieces, in sitting-room showcases, in bookshelves, and on bedside stools. Her picture has been adorning chapters on Harappan civilisation in schoolbooks for long.

Now, in the year when we should be celebrating her centennial birthday—she was dug out by Ernest Mackay in 1926, and now lives in Delhi's National Museum—a few fig-leafed pedagogues have sought to clothe the four millennia-old dancing girl of Mohenjo-daro. A few textbook writers of NCERT, who thought her nakedness a national shame, and made an attempt to mask her nakedness to the satvik class nine schoolboys and girls of Bharatvarsha. Luckily, historians and art historians objected, and the bid to dress her up has for now been given up.