Move to bring ‘Dancing Girl’ back from India
The Dancing Girl
LAHORE: A writ petition filed in the Lahore High Court on Monday has requested that directions be issued to the federal government to bring back from India the ‘Dancing Girl’ bronze statue excavated from Moenjodaro in 1926.
Barrister Javed Iqbal Jaffrey, the petitioner, has asked the LHC to take suo motu notice in this regard. He claims that the statue is the property of the Lahore Museum. It was taken to India around 60 years ago at the request of the National Arts Council, Delhi, and was never brought back.
Mr Jaffrey says the statue has the same historic importance as Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa in Europe. He calls it a marker of Pakistan’s cultural heritage which needs to be protected.
The statue is 10.5 centimetres tall and nearly 5,000 years old. Some of the most famous archaeologists in the world have described it as one of the most captivating pieces of art from the Indus site.
In a recent statement, Jamal Shah, director general of the Pakistan National Museum of Arts, hinted that the government was considering writing to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation to bring the statue back. “This is important if we want to protect our heritage.”
Dancing Girl (sculpture)
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Dancing Girl (bronze), Mohenjo-daro
Artist unknown, pre-historic
Year c. 2500 BC
Type bronze
Dimensions 10.5 cm × 5 cm (4 1/8 in × 2 in )
Location National Museum, New Delhi,
Delhi
Dancing Girl is a prehistoric
bronze sculpture made in approximately 2500 BCE in the
Indus Valley Civilisation city of
Mohenjo-daro (in modern-day
Pakistan), which was one of the earliest human cities. The statuette is 10.5 centimetres (4.1 in) tall, and depicts a young woman or girl with stylized proportions standing in a confident, naturalistic pose.
Dancing Girl is well-regarded as a work of art, and is a
cultural artefact of the Indus Valley Civilisation. The statuette was discovered by British archaeologist
Ernest Mackay in 1926, prior to the
Partition of India. It is held by the
National Museum, New Delhi, and ownership is disputed by Pakistan.
Description[edit]
A
bronze statuette DANCING GIRL is 10.5 centimetres (4.1 in) high and about 5,000 years old.
[1] It was found in the "HR area" of
Mohenjo-daro in 1926 by
Ernest Mackay.
[1] Although it is in a standing position, it was named
"Dancing Girl" with an assumption of her profession. This is one of two bronze art works found at Mohenjo-daro that show more flexible features when compared to other more formal poses. The girl is naked, wears a number of bangles and a necklace and is shown in a natural standing position with one hand on her hip.
[2] She wears 24 to 25 bangles on her left arm and 4 bangles on her right arm, and some object was held in her left hand, which is resting on her thigh; both arms are unusually long.
[3] One arm completely filled with bangles which is similar to
Banjara lady. Her necklace has three big pendants. She has her long hair styled in a big bun that is resting on her shoulder. This statue is a cultural artifact reflecting the aesthetics of a female body as conceptualized during that historical period.
[4]
Expert opinions[edit]
Second bronze statuette of a girl c.2500 BC, now displayed at
Karachi Museum, Pakistan.
In 1973, British archaeologist
Mortimer Wheeler described the item as his favorite statuette:
"She's about fifteen years old I should think, not more, but she stands there with bangles all the way up her arm and nothing else on. A girl perfectly, for the moment, perfectly confident of herself and the world. There's nothing like her, I think, in the world."
[5]
John Marshall, another archeologist at Mohenjo-daro, described the figure as "a young girl, her hand on her hip in a half-impudent posture, and legs slightly forward as she beats time to the music with her legs and feet".
[6] He is known to reacted with surprise when he saw this statuette. He said "When I first saw them I found it difficult to believe that they were prehistoric."
[7] The archaeologist
Gregory Possehl described
Dancing Girl as "the most captivating piece of art from an Indus site" and qualified the description of her as a dancer by stating that, "We may not be certain that she was a dancer, but she was good at what she did and she knew it."
[8]
The statue led to two important discoveries about the civilization: first that they knew metal blending, casting and other sophisticated methods, and secondly that entertainment, especially dance was part of the culture.
[1] The bronze girl was made using the
lost-wax casting technique and shows the expertise of the people in making bronze works during that time.
[2] The statue is displayed at
National Museum, New Delhi.
[1] A similar bronze statuette was found by Mackay during his final full season of 1930–31 at DK-G area in a house at Mohenjo-daro. The preservation, as well as quality of craftsmanship, is inferior to that of the well known
Dancing Girl.
[8] This second bronze female figure is displayed at
Karachi Museum, Pakistan.
[9]
An engraving on a piece of red
potsherd, discovered at
Bhirrana, India, a Harappan site in Fatehabad district in Haryana, shows an image that is evocative of
Dancing Girl. The excavation team leader, L. S. Rao, Superintending Archaeologist, Excavation Branch, ASI, remarked that, “... the delineation [of the lines in the potsherd] is so true to the stance, including the disposition of the hands, of the bronze that it appears that the craftsman of Bhirrana had first-hand knowledge of the former”.
[10][11]
Pakistan's demand[edit]
Some Pakistani politicians and experts have demanded that the Dancing Girl be "returned" to Pakistan.
[12] In 2016 Pakistani barrister, Javed Iqbal Jaffery, petitioned the Lahore High Court for the return of the statue, claiming that it had been "taken from Pakistan 60 years ago on the request of the National Arts Council in Delhi but never returned." According to him, the Dancing Girl was to Pakistan what Da Vinci's Mona Lisa was to Europe.
[13]
Pre-History & Archaeology
Hover over the image to see more details.
Dancing Girl
C. 2500 B.C.
Place of Origin: Mohenjodaro
Materials: Bronze
Dimensions: 10.5 x 5 x 2.5 cm.
Acc. No. 5721/195
One of the rarest artefacts world-over, a unique blend of antiqueness and art indexing the lifestyle, taste and cultural excellence of a people in such remote past as about five millenniums from now, the tiny bronze-cast, the statue of a young lady now unanimously called 'Indus dancing girl', represents a stylistically poised female figure performing a dance. The forward thrust of the left leg and backwards tilted right, the gesture of the hands, demeanour of the face and uplifted head, all speak of absorption in dance, perhaps one of those early styles that combined drama with dance, and dialogue with body-gestures. As was not unusual in the lifestyle of early days, the young lady has been cast as nude. The statue, recovered in excavation from 'HR area' of Mohenjo-Daro, is suggestive of two major breaks-through, one, that the Indus artists knew metal blending and casting and perhaps other technical aspects of metallurgy, and two, that a well developed society Indus people had innovated dance and other performing arts as modes of entertainment.
Large eyes, flat nose, well-fed cheeks, bunched curly hair and broad forehead define the iconography of the lady, while a tall figure with large legs and arms, high neck, subdued belly, moderately sized breasts and sensuously modeled waist-part along vagina, her anatomy. The adornment of her left arm is widely different from the right. While just two, though heavy, rings adorn her right arm, the left is covered in entirety with heavy ringed bangles. Besides, the figure has been cast as wearing on her breasts a necklace with four 'phalis' like shaped pendants. Though a small work of art, it is impressive and surpasses in plasticity and sensuousness the heavily ornate terracotta figurines.