The Dancer of Mohenjo-daro

This artwork is an oil painting depiction of the famous Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-daro, discovered in the Larkana District of Sindh Province, Pakistan. She was excavated by the British archaeologist Ernest Mackay from the HR area of the lower town, south-west of the Mohenjo-daro citadel, during the winter season of 1926–27. The original is an impressive 10.5 cm bronze statuette created using the lost-wax casting technique, depicting a young nude woman in a confident pose, one hand resting on her hip, the other arm hanging by her side. She appears to be wearing four rows of ivory bangles, a style of adornment still worn to this day by women in parts of Sindh and western Rajasthan, connecting us across four and a half millennia to the daily life of the Indus Valley.

Two very interesting continuations of this same pose have been found elsewhere: a second bronze figurine from the DK-G area of the lower town in Mohenjo-daro itself, and an engraved potsherd discovered over a thousand kilometres further east at the site of Bhirrana in Fatehabad District, Haryana, near the intersection of the state borders of Charda Punjab, Rajasthan, and Haryana. That the same image appears across such vast distances tells us that either she, or at least that pose, meant something to the ancient people, though what exactly we may never know.

This painting is dedicated as a New Year gift to Indians and Pakistanis alike, celebrating our common heritage from the Indus Valley Civilisation. In bringing her to life on canvas, this artwork tries to stay true to the words of Sir Mortimer Wheeler, who described the original statuette thus: “perfectly confident of herself and the world”