The "Dancing girl" found in Mohenjo-daro is an artifact that echoes the architectural wonders of ancient, deep buried long ago. Some 4500 years old, this 10.8 cm long bronze statue of the dancing girl was found in 1926 from a broken down house on the "ninth lane" in Mohenjo-daro. The figurine of the dancing girl of Mohenjodaro has changed the way one looked at Indian art of antiquity. The "pert liveliness" of the minute figure is unparallel and amidst its curves and pose whispers the secret of the ancient age. The bronze statuette is hardly four inches high yet speaks ample of the superb craftsmanship and of the caster`s skills.
The little dancing girl is as if a surmise echoing across the ages, a culture both distant and not so far, depicting a moment away from the present day, in one pretty tangible instant. The vivacity of the figurine since ages has drawn attention of the scholars. The dancing girl of Mohenjodaro is without any clothes; while her left leg is slightly bent , it is her arm that delicately rests on her thigh. Her entire weight is there on her right leg and the right arm is resting on her hips in an elegantly insouciant gesture. Her elaborately coiled hair, her bangles and necklaces speaks of the social life of the then India. A moment captured eternally, a vivid impression of the young the dancing girl of Mohenjodaro so ideally "beats time to the music with her legs and feet..."
In 1973, British archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler described the item as his favorite statuette:
"There is her little Balochi-style face with pouting lips and insolent look in the eyes. She's about fifteen years old I should think, not more, but she stands there with bangles all the way up her arm and nothing else on. A girl perfectly, for the moment, perfectly confident of herself and the world. There's nothing like her, I think, in the world."
John Marshall, another archeologist at Mohenjo-daro, described the figure as "a young girl, her hand on her hip in a half-impudent posture, and legs slightly forward as she beats time to the music with her legs and feet."[12] The archaeologist Gregory Possehl said of the statuette, "We may not be certain that she was a dancer, but she was good at what she did and she knew it".
The creativity of this lovely dancing girl of Mohenjodaro crosses time and space whilst murmuring the secrets of an apparently enigmatic, but at least fleetingly recognizable past of India.
Artifacts from the Indus Valley Civilization gallery of National Museum, New Delhi India.
The Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) was a Bronze Age civilization (3300–1300 BCE; mature period 2600–1900 BCE) that was located in the northwestern region of the Indian subcontinent, consisting of what is now mainly present-day Pakistan and northwest India.[4]Flourishing around the Indus River basin, the civilization extended east into the Ghaggar-Hakra River valley and the upper reachesGanges-Yamuna Doab; it extended west to the Makran coast of Balochistan, north to northeastern Afghanistan and south to Daimabadin Maharashtra. The civilization was spread over some 1,260,000 km², making it the largest ancient civilization.
The Indus Valley is one of the world's earliest urban civilizations, along with its contemporaries, Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt. At its peak, the Indus Civilization may have had a population of well over five million. Inhabitants of the ancient Indus river valley developed new techniques in handicraft (carnelian products, seal carving) and metallurgy (copper, bronze, lead, and tin). The civilization is noted for its cities built of brick, roadside drainage system, and multistoried houses.
The Indus Valley Civilization is also known as the Harappan Civilization, as the first of its cities to be unearthed was located at Harappa, excavated in the 1920s in what was at the time the Punjab province of British India (now in Pakistan). Excavation of Harappan sites has been ongoing since 1920, with important breakthroughs occurring as recently as 1999. There were earlier and later cultures, often called Early Harappan and Late Harappan, in the same area of the Harappan Civilization. The Harappan civilisation is sometimes called the Mature Harappan culture to distinguish it from these cultures. Up to 1,999, over 1,056 cities and settlements have been found, out of which 96 have been excavated, mainly in the general region of the Indus and Ghaggar-Hakra river and its tributaries. Among the settlements were the major urban centres of Harappa, Lothal, Mohenjo-daro (UNESCO World Heritage Site), Dholavira, Kalibanga, and Rakhigarhi.
Source:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_Valley_Civilization 