NCERT withdraws decision to cover torso of Indus Valley ‘dancing girl’ statue in textbook

The National Council of Educational Research and Training on Monday said that it will restore the original photograph of the iconic “Dancing Girl” sculpture in the new arts textbook for Class 9, ANI reported.

While the original version of the photograph showed the bronze sculpture of a young woman or a girl with a bare torso, the updated textbook had shown it to be covered, The Indian Express reported on Monday.

The statue, of a girl wearing ornaments and with her hair tied in a bun, is believed to have been sculpted between 2300 BC and 1750 BC in the Indus Valley Civilisation city of Mohenjo-daro, now in Pakistan.

The sculpture is in the National Museum in Delhi.

In the updated photo, the statue’s torso had been covered with a dark shading, which hid anatomical details that had been visible earlier.

The statue had been a topic of discussion earlier as well, during which a Union government expert pushed back against objections from some council members who considered it a nude depiction, The Indian Express reported.

On Monday, the council’s Director Dinesh Saklani told ANI that the department was directed to look into the matter as soon as a row erupted over the changes to the image in the textbook.

“Following consultations with experts, the department is replacing the image of the Dancing Girl with its original version,” Saklani told the news agency. “The correction is being implemented immediately in the digital version of the textbook, while the revised print editions will carry the original version of the image.”

‘An act of censorship’

The council’s decision came amid pushback.

Michel Danino, who led the development committee for the council’s new Class 6 Social Science textbooks, told PTI that he had earlier been told that the statue was considered unsuitable for younger students.

“The reason I was given was that the image of the Dancing Girl was not age-appropriate,” PTI quoted Danino as saying. “Our team disagreed; we even checked with teachers of Class 6, and they told us there was never a problem with the Dancing Girl.”

He added: “The notion that nudity is inappropriate is, in my opinion, an obsolete Victorian view. Yet we speak of decolonising Indian education.”

Commenting on the fresh row relating to the Class 9 textbook, The Indian Express quoted Danino as saying that “the shading of the figure’s whole trunk is an act of censorship” and “wrong and unfair to the student”.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

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