Wednesday, November 2, 2022 - 12:00pm to 1:00pm
Presenter: Mina Rajagopalan
202 Frick Fine Arts Building
In 1926 British colonial archaeologists found a bronze statue in Mohenjodaro (now Pakistan). Small enough to fit in the palm of a hand and made close to 4000 years ago, the female figure wears only jewelry and sports an elaborate hairdo. Perhaps it was her posture: one arm akimbo resting on her waist and leg bent at the knee, that led the male archaeologists to dub her the Dancing Girl. Since then, archaeologists, curators, and art historians have suggested that she could just as easily represent a female warrior, laborer, or devotee. Yet, the sculpture continues to be displayed at the National Museum, New Delhi as Dancing Girl. This presentation (a rehearsal for a talk at the Cincinnati Art Museum as part of their exhibition Beyond Bollywood: 2000 Years of Dance in Art) offers a critical rethinking of female dancers in Indian art as more than passive receptacles of heterosexual male desire or predictable ciphers of femininity. Nearly one hundred years after the Indus bronze was found by male colonialists, it is time to reconsider both her infantilizing moniker of “dancing girl” and the predictable destinies to which she and others Indian dancers have been doomed.
Image: The Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-daro; 2300-1750 BCE; bronze; height: 10.8 cm (41⁄4 in.). National Museum, New Delhi, India