A
teaser of Ashutosh Gowariker’s period drama is riddled with inaccuracies about
the Indus Valley Civilisation.
Bollywood’s period dramas have a history of
misrepresenting the past. From Mughal-e-Azam (1960), where the story of Salim’s
rebellion is wrongly attributed to love, to Bajirao Mastani (2015) portraying Balaji Bajirao as a
Marathi superman, Bollywood cannot seem to get the history right in historical
fiction. The trailer and posters of Ashutosh Gowariker’s Mohenjo Daro indicate
that this tradition will be perpetuated.
First, Gowariker seems to have confused the
Vedic Age with the Indus Valley Civilisation. Even though the trailer reveals
that the movie is set in 2016 BC, it surprisingly features white Arabian
horses. It is now widely accepted that horses were brought in by the Eurasian populace
(or the “Aryans”) that started migrating to the subcontinent from 1500 BC on
wards. Couple this with the heavily Sanskritised Hindi spoken in the movie
trailer and you have yourself a bad cocktail of two different eras (separated
by at least 500 years). The trailer gives away glimpses of a Roman-esque arena
hosting gladiatorial wars, a feature that finds no mention in Indus Valley
Civilisation history.
The
trailer ends with the great deluge hitting the environs of Mohenjo-Daro and
brings to life the long-held stereotype about the great Indus flood. The Indus
flood hypothesis has long been discarded as a reason for the civilisation’s
decline. But everyone loves a fanciful collapse, especially when Bollywood
manufactures it.
Yet,
the biggest slight is in the way the people of Indus Valley have been depicted.
The heroine Chaani, played by Pooja Hegde, has feathers popping out of her
headdress even as none of the innumerable terracotta figurines of the Indus
Valley Civilisation sport such a headdress.
Feathered
headdress is one of the quintessential ways in which Bollywood has for ages
depicted tribal/clannish societies because in its Orientalist history, all
tribal societies across time and space are the same. Chaani is tribal only in
her headdress, though: her thigh-high slit skirt ensemble is straight from the
red carpet. Chaani, her friends and even the priest king (Kabir Bedi) have
pearly-white complexions, which reflects popular cinema’s “fair and
lovely" bias and may not correspond to the complexion of the population of
the Indus Valley Civilisation. The majority of Indus Valley people were perhaps
dark-skinned, especially the Proto Australoid population inhabiting several
sites of the civilisation.
The
Indus Valley Civilisation, known for its standardised weights, distinctive
pottery styles, planned cities and extensive public works, has left behind a
significant amount of material culture from which to piece its history. More
than 10,000 terracotta figurines, unearthed from various sites of the Indus
Valley Civilisation were available for Gowariker’s perusal to depict a
prototype of the Mohenjo-Daro woman. These figurines not only depict the body
type of the Indus Valley people but also reveal their fashion in terms of their
dress and accessories. Female terracotta figurines dominate the assemblage and
are clothed and ornamented in opposition to male figurines that are mostly
nude.
The
Harappan female body with conical breasts and curvaceous waist is mostly
depicted wearing a triangular/fan shaped headdress, with no garments covering
the upper body and multiple strand belts/skirts hiding the pubic area. The male
body on the other hand is relatively slender, at times shown with prominent
nipples and male genitalia. Like females the males also sometimes sport a
headdress, although such occurrences are rare in the assemblage.
Even
though cloth, being a perishable material, has left few traces in the imprints
of Harappan history, Rita Wright in her book Ancient Indus informs that
“weavers worked with animal fibers and plants including cotton, linen, and jute
producing basketry, cloth and other woven items”. Yet, the only item of
clothing depicted on female figurines is the short skirt and a drape around the
torso of a few male figurines.
A
significant part of Harappan fashion was ornaments. Necklaces, earpieces, belts
and bangles were in vogue and most of them were made from beads. The Indus
Valley people seem to have mastered the art of bead making since colourful
beads of all shapes and sizes have been unearthed in large quantities from many
Indus Valley sites. Beads were cylindrical, disc-shaped, spherical, globular,
biconical and segmented (wafer-like) and fashioned from all sorts of stones
such as lapis lazuli, carnelian, steatite, jasper, shell, quartz, faience and
also gold and silver. The material for bead making was sourced from many
places. Lapis lazuli, a blue stone and highly valued, came from Shortughai in
Afghanistan, copper from Khetri region of Rajasthan, carnelian from Bharuch in
Gujarat and gold from southern parts of India. Desirable colours were obtained
by firing the raw material, like firing carnelian at different stages of
production would change its red colour to yellow. Beads as small as 1 to 3
millimeters in length, known as micro beads, were also made and were used
mainly for making rings, earpieces and necklaces.
Beads
were used to make necklaces, especially chokers, which are seen on most female
figurines. Many male figurines sport necklaces too. Apart from chokers, longer
necklaces with double or triple strands of beads were also popular.
Single-strand necklaces were usually composed of gold beads alternating with
natural stone beads. Earpieces, found mostly on female figurines, were also
made from beads. These ranged from ear-rings or hoops, composed of several
micro beads stringed together, to ear studs composed of a large bead attached
to the ear lobe. The belts that often cover the pubic area of female figurines
were also made from beads.
Another important accessory is the bangle. Enormous
quantities of terracotta bangles have been excavated from many Indus Valley
sites and both male and female figurines are shown wearing bangles. Most
figurines depict three or four bangles at the wrist and two or more bangles
above the elbow. The famous bronze dancing girl statuette from Mohenjo-Daro has
her left arms full of bangles from the wrist to the shoulder while the right
arm has only four bangles. While terracotta bangles seem to be the most
popular, shell bangles have also been found.
Chaani
is introduced in the trailer as Sindhu
maa ka prateek (symbol
of the Indus mother goddess), which relies on the stereotype that a mother
goddess/fertility cult was popular in the civilisation. The theory about the
mother goddess cult is as outdated as the Aryan invasion theory. The theory is
based on flimsy evidence and a superimposition of the present onto the past.
The view was part of the larger belief popular in the 19th and 20th centuries
that a mother goddess cult existed in areas from present day Turkey to western
Asia during antiquity. Apart from colonial proponents of the theory, such as
John Marshall, many Indian archaeologists (such as BB Lal) also support the
view since a widespread mother goddess cult exists in the subcontinent today.
Recent studies (such as Bruce Trigger, 2003) have contested such claims since
there is nothing in the female terracotta figurines of the Indus Valley
assemblage to classify them as mother goddesses. This is perhaps why Lynn
Meskell in her paper Goddess, Gimbutas and New Age Archaeology, Antiquity, 69,
1995 says, “To assume a priori that there is a goddess behind every figurine is
tantamount to interpreting plastic figures of Virgin Mary and of ‘Barbie’ as
having identical significance.”
Judging
from the trailer, it seems that long-held and mostly discarded stereotypes
about the Indus Valley civilisation find an expression in Gowariker’s Mohenjo Daro. Hopefully
the movie will be better.
Representative
Image
Source: DAWN
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