Revision as of 18:21, 26 January 2017

Mohenjodaro

The mound of the dead

Text and photographs by Ameer Hamza

Dawn

Mohenjodaro

Mohenjodaro

Mohenjodaro

Mohenjodaro

Mohenjodaro

If you’ve seen the back of a ten-rupee currency note carefully, you must have seen the photograph of a peculiar mound on it. It is called the ‘Mound of the Dead’ by archaeologists, and it is located at Mohenjodaro (literally, the mound of mohen).

Mohenjodaro was one of the principal cities of the Indus Valley civilisation. It flourished around 2,500BC and is one of the archaeological sites in Pakistan on Unesco’s list of protected monuments.

Sir John Marshall supervised its excavation in the early ’20s and his car is still in the Mohenjodaro museum, representing his presence, struggle and dedication to the place.

As a result of the excavation, almost one-third of the old city was recovered, revealing for the first time the remains of one of the most ancient civilisations in the Indus Valley. Typical of most large and planned cities, Mohenjodaro had streets and buildings.

The area roughly lodged 5,000 people, and had houses, a granary, baths, assembly halls and towers. The citadel included an elaborate tank or bath created with fine quality brickwork and drains; this was surrounded by a veranda. Also located here were a giant granary, a large residential structure and at least two aisled assembly halls.

From the excavations one can make out that the city was divided into two different sections; the lower and the upper parts. The upper area was man-made, and most probably it was from here that the rulers ruled. There was a great bath near this mound which everyone was allowed to use. The huge granary remnants are still beautiful even today.

The lower section was where the common man lived. The streets cut each other at exactly 90 degrees. They were nine metres long. Alongside the streets ran the drainage system, which was so advanced that no civilisation of its time could match it.

The houses were well-built and were mostly made in block style, with small windows for ventilation. Some of the houses were huge and some had a kind of plaster on them. However, most of that plaster has vanished now.

The most famous features of Mohenjodaro that have survived are the priest king wearing an ajrak, the square bull seals that have also been found in Mesopotamia (Iraq), the dancing girl and the weights they used. Its text has not been deciphered yet, which makes it impossible to ascertain their true social, political and religious life.

To add mystery to the Mohenjodaro drama, we don’t know what happened to the Indus Valley civilisation. It seems to have been abandoned about 1700BC. It is possible that a great flood destroyed it. The moving tectonic plates that created the Himalayas may have caused a devastating earthquake. It is also possible that its inhabitants may have been defeated by another civilisation.

Unfortunately, for all its charm and mysteries, this magnificent ‘city of the dead’ is in danger of getting soaked in salt — literally. Saltish water is rising rapidly, and if no action is taken immediately then we might lose this priceless heritage forever.

The Dancing Girl of Mohenjodaro

Malini Nair, A sassy 5,000-year-old teen is back in the news, Oct 24 2016 : The Times of India

With a Pakistani lawyer demanding that India return the Dancing Girl of Mohenjodaro, the iconic figurine has become the subject of much dance and debate She is a skinny , sassy, cool teen. And about 5,000 years old. So, what could the Dancing Girl of Mohenjodaro, all of 800gm and 10.5cm in height, have anything to do with the millennial world? Lots, actually. The most charismatic face of the Indus Valley Civilization is not only being demanded back by Pakistan for the Lahore Museum, she has also become a subject of great interest among dancers and culture scholars.

“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 perfect ly, for the moment, perfectly confident of herself and the world. There's nothing like her, I think, in the world,“ colonial archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler had said of the inscrutable gawky girl cast in bronze.

But what happens to her when she g rows up? Last Saturday , at the Gati contemporary dance festival, Sujata Goel merged her own identity with the historical icon, reinterpreting her as a series of contemporary female figures. Here were the stylized poses and movements of women we have gazed at in contemporary images -the awkward ramp walk, a temple frieze, a Bharatanatyam posture, an item number, the provocative pinup, the bar dancer. Today , the dancing girl could have been frozen in any of these movements.

The Mohenjodaro figurine is riveting -upright, one arm behind her, hip out, leg slightly bent, eyes closed, full lips and hair in a loose bun.After she was found at the dig site in 1926, an inscrutable Mona Lisa-esque figure, she became the subject of much academic conjecture -was she Dravidian, Nubian or Baloch? Was she actually danc ing or simply in a univer sally feminine posture of impatience? She certainly looks impudent, agree his torians. Almost, says archaeologist John Marshall, as if she were impatiently beating time with her extended foot.

Goel says the pre cocious dancing girl's figure is in many ways ancient, classi cal and hyper-mod ern all at the same time -she is in control of herself and her sexuality .Could she possibly be sneering at the moralists around her, she asks? Goel's 40-minute dance collage was a deliberately stylized take on the 100 different ways the female form is presented on popular and elite platforms -hip out, bust out, expressionless but the eyes always inward looking.

The choreography has been evolving over a couple of years but Goel says her dance is very much a reflection of modern politics. “I was preoccupied with the concepts of beauty, seduction, eroticism and their power dynamics,“ she says.

The incongruous costumes and accessories include the full headgear of a classical dancer, and a busty skirt costume that is nearly traditional but stops at the knee. The idea, says Goel, is to be knowingly objectified. “That can be a liberating experience, I think,“ she says.

The demand that she be `returned' to her home in Pakistan has created fresh interest in this youngster. Apart from pa triotic indignation at the idea of her leaving the National Museum, social media was full of hilarious cracks about her: she looks like a woman in the ticket queue at the crowded Dadar station, a harried woman waiting for a bus, or a teenager in a sulk.

Historians have never really agreed on her “nautch“ status. Archaeologist Gregory Possehl puts it best: “We may not be certain that she was a dancer, but she was good at what she did and she knew it.“

At the discussions surrounding the dance at Gati, culture writer Sadanand Menon pointed to a historical detail on how political factors of the 1920s got her the name `dancing' girl. A debate was on then about the abolition of the Devadasi system.

“It was around this time they discovered this figure -a young woman, arms akimbo, in a tribhangi pose. And the figurine became conflated with the debate. It was also why classical dance revivalists took to saying our dance is 5,000 years old,“ says Menon who was told this by one of the archaeologists on the scene, H D Sankalia, in Pune, when the latter was in his 80s.