Dancing Girl

The object

The figure is about ten and a half centimetres high and shows a young woman standing with her weight on one leg, the other bent, her right hand on her hip and her left arm — heavily stacked with bangles — resting against her thigh. The head is tilted back, the hair gathered behind. She wears a necklace and nothing else.

It was found by Ernest Mackay in 1926 in a house in the lower town, and is held by the National Museum in New Delhi.

Technique

The figurine was cast by the lost-wax method, in which a wax model is encased in clay, melted out, and replaced with molten metal. Its existence at this date demonstrates that Indus metalworkers had a full command of the technique, and the assurance of the modelling — the relaxed asymmetry of the pose, the sense of weight — is unusual in any early bronze.

The name

The title is not ancient. John Marshall described the figure as a dancer, and the name stuck. There is nothing in the object to establish that she is dancing, or a girl in any specific sense, or of any particular social position; those readings have been layered onto a small bronze of a standing woman.

The point is worth making because the label shapes how the object is understood, and because it is characteristic of the Indus material generally — the Great Bath, the granary, the Priest-King and the Dancing Girl are all modern names carrying modern assumptions about a civilization whose own words cannot be read.

Reception

The figure has become an emblem of the civilization, reproduced on stamps and in every general account, and has been the subject of a long-running claim by Pakistan for its transfer from India. Its appeal is partly that it is one of very few Indus objects that reads immediately as a person rather than as an artefact.