I got the shock of my life when, as a teenager, I walked into the Delhi museum to discover that the life-sized image of the Dancing Girl that I was carrying in my head was merely four inches tall. But despite her Lilliputian stature, she seemed to own the room. I still cannot decide whether she is smirking at me or simply ignoring me, and that is exactly why she remains one of my top two favourite works of art. In fact, I was so enamoured of her that I named an ethnic jewellery brand after her.
We like to imagine ancient women as meek, passive figures, lacking in agency. But this myth crumbles the moment you look closely at the Dancing Girl. Stiff upper-lip British archaeologists described the 4,500-year-old teenager as ‘half impudent’ and ‘insolent’.
One wonders who this remarkable girl really was. The British colonial tag of ‘Nautch Girl’ is too simplistic and dismissive. She does not look like a deity, since she has little in common with the terracotta Mother Goddess figurines of Harappa, with their wide hips, fancy fan headdresses and prominent breasts. Perhaps she was a priestess or a princess, or a muse of a skilled lost-wax artist. Her swagger, smirk and hint of cockiness makes her really cool. With her messy bun, asymmetrical bangle styling (25 on one arm, 4 on the other) and a hand cocked on her hip, she looks like a modern runway model posing at the edge of a stage.
And then a classmate in a WhatsApp group made an astute observation: maybe she was simply an ordinary girl coming of age. She was found beside a fireplace in a residential house in the ‘ninth lane’ of Mohenjo-daro, not in a palace, a temple or a public building. Her smooth arms carry the memory of human touch, and even if she was only the girl next door, she left a lasting impression on the artist who cast her.
In October 2016, a Lahore lawyer petitioned his High Court to bring the Dancing Girl home, arguing that she matters to Pakistan as much as the Mona Lisa matters to Europe. Decades earlier, according to legend, a Pakistani premier thought otherwise. When Indira Gandhi told Zulfikar Ali Bhutto he could choose only one of the two most famous Mohenjo-daro figures, he picked the Priest-King over the nude Dancing Girl.
The Pakistani barrister, though, had made a brilliant comparison. These two women happen to be my top two favourite works of art. Though conceived four millennia apart, these compact yet enigmatic masterpieces exude a calm and subtle defiance, utterly falsifying the stereotype of the submissive historical woman.
The Mona Lisa too began as an ordinary commission, a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of a Florentine silk merchant. It was painted to celebrate a new house and a new baby. Yet the painter, Leonardo da Vinci never handed the painting over to her family. He kept her with him until he died, constantly tinkering with the details.
Neither woman is a seductress or a demure damsel. The Dancing Girl’s nudity is functional, not titillating. Unlike the wealthy women of Renaissance Florence, Mona Lisa wears no heavy brocades, elaborate pearl headdresses or showy jewels, and in fact no jewellery at all.
Both feel modern because we tend to assume that in-your-face individuality is a modern trait. Both are not meant to be consumed. While the Dancing Girl is quite indifferent, Mona Lisa goes a step further. She seems to be evaluating you, sizing you up, and her half-smile suggests amusement, as if she has already seen through the pretence that the spectator, the selfie-seeking tourist, had brought to the room.
Yet despite her faint disdain, spectators have been besotted with her, and when the Paris museum reopened after the Mona Lisa was stolen in 1911, people queued, perhaps for the first time in history, to stare at an empty patch of wall.
Mona Lisa and the Dancing Girl are two of the most self-assured women in art, and neither seems willing to perform for the viewer. They don’t need you. Their bodies and minds belong to them. They cannot be flattered, commanded or bought.
Perhaps that is why they have held my attention for almost half a century. Size, I have learnt, has very little to do with presence.
What is the smallest work of art that has made you feel like a guest in its room?
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