The naked Dancing Girl will stay ignored. Sorry, NCERT, we've failed you

For generations, Indian schoolchildren have turned not to an erotic but a blind eye to the 4,500-year-old Dancing Girl. By masking the Mohenjo-daro brass figurine's bare torso, the NCERT was trying to cultivate inquisitiveness in adolescents, who would have dug deeper. But we have failed the NCERT.

A fish doesn't notice the water, they say. It is true for humans as well. We call it beat blindness in journalism, where a reporter misses a story because it is too obvious. The familiarity blindness must have been a big challenge for academicians and the NCERT, which designs textbooks for millions of children studying in schools affiliated to the CBSE. And in a masterstroke, the NCERT masked the torso and the groin of the 4,500-year-old Dancing Girl, and tried to ensure that millions of schoolchildren now dig deep.

The NCERT has been accused of Victorian prudishness. Critics couldn't decipher the true intent and the NCERT never revealed Victoria's secrets. So, we will have to function in the realm of unspoken desires. Of great expectations foiled by low-IQ people. The textbook development committee that worked to mask the Dancing Girl must be so flustered now.

After the brouhaha, NCERT Director Dinesh Saklani said on Monday evening that the covered-up Dancing Girl image will be replaced with the original version in the Class 9 art textbook.

The Dancing Girl is no Madame Tussauds wax. She is heavy metal. Made out of bronze using the lost art of wax-casting. She oozes attitude, with one hand on the hip and the other laden with bangles. That was all we noticed. Even at the time when hormones played havoc and testosterone toasted our brains, the bronze Dancing Girl was just that. Bronze Dancing Girl.

Until today, some 20 years later and after several visits to the National Museum in New Delhi where she is housed, I didn't ogle at her. I never noticed her bare torso and groin. What a travesty to her existence of over 4,500 years! When I was a teen, there was Pamela Anderson from Baywatch on the small telly. Why would I ogle at a 10.5-cm figurine from the Sindhu-Saraswati or Indus Valley Civilisation?

Teens today have more than Pam Anderson in swimsuits. There's so much more that countries like Australia and the UK have enforced a ban on social media use for those under 16. Parents are always anxious about what their children might stumble upon in the corners of the internet.

There's a fat chance that the Dancing Girl would be noticed even by a teenager in some distant dehaat. This is where the textbook development committee tried an odd trick, covering the bare torso and groin area of the bronze image. The chatter and the masking will get the students to sit up and take note. And leave the rest to the inquisitive mind and the internet. The Dancing Girl would no longer escape the teenage scrutiny and the boy's gaze. Brilliant!

The cover-up wasn't an act of commission, not one of omission. The committee that prepared the social science textbook for Class 6 debated and left Dancing Girl as it is. They must have thought the 6th graders wouldn't dive deep. Those in Grade 9 most likely will. Job well done!

What's most interesting is that the Class 9 NCERT book has to do with History of Art. If there's no attention to detail, how can you appreciate art? Making the obvious scandalous is an immediate way of drawing the attention of one and all. They succeeded. The whole country was talking about the bronze Dancing Girl on a Monday that's reserved for the blues.

It's all reverse-psychology. The experts at NCERT saw smokers turn a blind eye to the health warning and obnoxious images on cigarette packets. No smoker even looks at it because the eyes know which areas to avoid.

How about putting the health warning below a nice silver layer of 'scratch here'? Or as a surprise in the silver foil inside, like in a Fortune Cookie? The tobacco industry and the government didn't try to innovate. They just let millions of smokers use familiarity blindness as a defence mechanism. The academicians at NCERT's textbook development committee tried to employ a rare tactic, but our collective low IQ became a hindrance.

The Dancing Girl has survived in her naked glory for over 4,500 years. She will survive scores of years more on the pages of textbooks, and just be ignored. No adolescent will look hard enough. We have failed the NCERT's brave efforts. Understandably, NCERT has decided to unmask the Dancing Girl. Prudes meet prudence, at least for now.

- Ends