Object · Harappan bronze statuette
Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-daro
Also known as Dancing Girl, Dancing Girl (prehistoric sculpture), Bronze Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-daro
A bronze statuette 10.5 centimetres high, cast by the lost-wax method at Mohenjo-daro around 2300–1750 BCE: a nude young woman standing with one hand on her hip, her hair in a heavy bun, 24 or 25 bangles on her left arm. Ernest Mackay excavated her in 1926. She showed that Harappan craftsmen knew metal blending and casting, and she became a prize in the 1947 division of the Mohenjo-daro finds: Pakistan took the Priest-King, India kept her.
- Date
- c. 2300–1750 BCE
- Function
- Archaeology & heritage
- Material
- Bronze
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
Mortimer Wheeler named her his favourite statuette, a girl he thought unmatched anywhere in the world. Jonathan Kenoyer argues that the 'dancer' label reflects a colonial picture of Indian dancers and that she more likely carries an offering.
About the place
National Museum, New Delhi
The same source dates her both c. 2300–1750 BCE and c. 2000 BCE, and credits the find both to Ernest Mackay and to John Marshall. Whether she is a dancer at all is disputed.
Connections (5)
- Excavated atMohenjo-daro
Ernest Mackay excavated the Dancing Girl in the HR area of Mohenjo-daro in 1926. She is one of two bronze figures from the city in loose, natural poses rather than formal ones; Mackay found the second, poorer in quality and preservation, in a house in the DK-G area in 1930–31, and it is now in the National Museum of Pakistan. Together they showed that the city's metalworkers knew alloying and lost-wax casting, and, if she is a dancer, that dance was part of its life.
- Located atNational Museum, New Delhi
The Dancing Girl is in the National Museum, New Delhi. The Mohenjo-daro finds went first to the Lahore Museum and then to the Archaeological Survey of India in New Delhi, where a Central Imperial Museum was planned. At Partition the roughly 12,000 objects, mostly potsherds, were split equally between India and Pakistan, some necklaces having their beads divided into two piles; Pakistan chose the so-called Priest-King and India kept the much smaller Dancing Girl.
- Object journeyLahore
The Mohenjo-daro finds, the Dancing Girl among them, were first deposited in the Lahore Museum after excavation, before being moved to New Delhi. Lahore is also where the claim for her return has been pressed: in 2016 the barrister Javed Iqbal Jaffery petitioned the Lahore High Court, comparing her place in Pakistan to the Mona Lisa's in Europe. Some Pakistani politicians have made similar demands, but the Pakistani government has made no public request to India.
- AnalogueDhokra
The Dancing Girl is one of the earliest known lost-wax castings, and dhokra, the non-ferrous lost-wax casting still practised in India today, uses the same technique, which has been in use on the subcontinent for over four thousand years. No documented line of transmission joins the Harappan workshop to the modern dhokra artisans, so the tie is one of method rather than lineage, but the figure is cited as the earliest landmark of the Indian lost-wax tradition.
- AnalogueBhirrana
A piece of red pottery from Bhirrana, a Harappan site in Fatehabad district, Haryana, carries an engraving that recalls the Dancing Girl. The excavation leader, L. S. Rao of the Archaeological Survey of India, said the drawing matched the bronze's stance and the placing of her hands so closely that the Bhirrana craftsman seemed to have known the figure at first hand, an echo of one image across two Harappan sites far apart.
Sources
Wikipedia, "Dancing Girl (prehistoric sculpture)" and "Dhokra". Gregory Possehl, The Indus Civilization: A Contemporary Perspective (2002); Jane McIntosh, The Ancient Indus Valley: New Perspectives (2008); Kavita Singh, "The Museum Is National", in No Touching, No Spitting, No Praying (2015).
Open Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-daro in the repository →