An enigmatic citizen.

[Text and photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

Most tourists to Paris strive to see the Eiffel, and the Mona Lisa. The tower is grand; and the painting, a museum exhibit, is profoundly enigmatic.

Most tourists to Delhi strive to see the Qutub. This tower too is grand. On the other hand, a particularly striking museum exhibit in the city fails to command the Mona Lisa’s wild popularity, though it is as enigmatic.

Nevertheless, the Dancing Girl is one of the most celebrated souvenirs in the National Museum’s massive collection, representing various epochs of the Indian past. Last week, a university professor was briefly arrested for allegedly stealing the Dancing Girl’s replica from the museum.

Sculptured in bronze 4,000 years ago, the Dancing Girl was discovered in 1926 in Mohenjo-daro, the ancient archaeological site in present-day Pakistan. Just like Mona Lisa, her legendary stature doesn’t match the limited dimensions of the actual artwork. The Dancing Girl is just four inches tall. Attired in bangles and a beaded necklace, she stands with her right arm on the waist. Her left leg is propelled forward. Her chin is raised slightly upwards. Her eyes are shut. The museum’s website makes a mention of the Dancing Girl’s mysterious qualities, “leaving us to wonder—who she was, and what was her position in society?”

We have a more substantial idea of many other dancing girls of Delhi, who came much later. A young man from Hyderabad called Dargah Quli Khan stayed in Mughal-era Delhi from 1739 to 1741. His diary of those years—Muraqqa e Dehli—contains observations on the city life, and includes his impressions of that Delhi’s famous dancing girls: Ad Begum would paint her legs with designs that looked like pajamas; Nur Bai would commute on her own elephant; Behnai-Feel Sawar had mace bearers as attendants; and Chamani’s tongue moved sharper than the scissor during her rendering of the rag tarana.

A woman closer to our lifetime, who used to be a dancing girl, lies buried forlorn at the Christian Cemetery in central Delhi’s Prithviraj Road. The inscription on her austere grave describes her as “Stella of Mudge, a fable.” Born in England, fate introduced the young woman to the then Maharaja of Kapurthala, while she were a cabaret dancer at a music hall in Paris. She moved to India, became his third wife, and is said to have died a lonesome death in a Delhi hospital in 1984.

As for the Mohenjo-daro dancer, British archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler, who served as director general of the Archaeological Survey of India during the 1940s, offered a thoughtfully decorous tribute, describing her as “a girl, for the moment, perfectly confident of herself and the world. There’s nothing like her, I think, in the world.”