During this academic year, Class 9 students using the hard copy of the Madhurima Art textbook will see an image of the ‘Dancing Girl’ bronze artifact from Mohenjo-daro, in which she is greyed-out from armpit to upper thigh in a rudimentary Microsoft Paint style.
Next year, the revised edition will bring back the uncensored image. The digital edition has already reverted.
All this stems from a brief controversy this month when the misrepresentation of the iconic statuette became public. Following criticism, the NCERT acted quickly, rescinding the cover-up. The image had been altered only for the Class 9 Art textbook, while others, including the Class 6 Social Science one, featured an unaltered photograph.
This year though, the presence of the “clothed” artifact in their Madhurima pages should make for interesting classroom discussions, and bright students and open-minded teachers are likely to grasp the opportunity.
Perhaps some of those discussions will be about censorship in general, on a broader socio-political scale. Banned books, the muzzling of freedom of speech, curbs on the media, treatment of dissent, how algorithms are designed for capitalistic and repressive agendas, the impact of all this on the arts, the many intersectional linkages... These are thought-provoking, debatable subjects, and a great utilisation of this case of bowdlerisation.
Then, there is the context of the censorship of textbooks. Most students who are in Class 9 in India today, with the exception of those benefiting from alternate education models, have probably been exposed to pedagogic materials with an increasingly right-wing slant. In recent times, there have been a slew of edits to NCERT textbooks that are concerning, if not alarming. Since 2023, material pertaining to the Delhi Sultanate, Gandhi’s assassination, Darwin’s theory of evolution, caste atrocities and work by Dalit writers, energy and sustainability, and the 2002 Gujarat riots were expurgated. Textbooks can and should be updated in order to avoid education becoming fossilised rather than staying dynamic. But ideological motivations are not the same thing as expanding enquiry.
Considering all this, that the NCERT has responded so well to the ‘Dancing Girl’ controversy is surprising. We cannot know the internal workings that led to either the censorship itself or to its being walked back. We do know that the Ministry of Culture’s 2023 International Museum Expo had a clothed, fair-skinned version of ‘Dancing Girl’ as its mascot.
Another discussion for the classroom then: freedom, objectification, feminism, the body as belonging to the self, but on which much is projected or coded, and the male gaze. Why might the ‘Dancing Girl’ have been covered up by NCERT, beyond conservatism? Is there any argument to be made that she should have been?
Who was the ‘Dancing Girl’ anyway? The descriptor came from her colonial unearthers. Scholars posit she may have been intended as a warrior, farmer, or priestess, based on her confident pose. If the statuette was based on a real person, how could we see her beyond simplistic terms? What roles might geography, ecology, caste, gender, and language have had to play in her life?
What these questions invite are leaps of the imagination — that superpower that is so stifled in the world right now.