I have visited both Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, two of the great urban centres of the Indus Civilisation, located in present-day Pakistan. Standing among their brick ruins, I was struck by how much had survived in material form — and how much of the human life once lived there remains beyond our reach.

Years later, watching Omar Khan’s documentary Mohenjo-daro: Unsealing an Ancient Indus City returned me to that tension - How much an ancient city can reveal, and how much it continues to withhold.

Watch this: https://youtu.be/BxyxVgAMM_4?si=SyyC4-kIb5V4X6Km

CAPTION: Mohenjo daro: Unsealing an Ancient Indus City documentary

Bricks endure. Drains can be mapped. Seals can be catalogued. Metal objects can be preserved and displayed. We can trace evidence of trade, craftsmanship and organised urban life. However, it does not always tell us who performed which tasks, how labour was divided, who controlled resources, or how authority operated inside homes and communities. 

Affection, fear, domestic labour, negotiation, aspiration and resistance rarely leave orderly evidence. And when we ask about the women who inhabited those streets and homes, certainty gives way to silence.

An online session hosted by the South Asia Peace Action Network recently brought filmmaker Omar Khan into conversation with Sudeshna Guha, a historian of the archaeology of the Indus Civilisation, and author and poet Sehba Sarwar. 

Dancer and activist Sheema Kermani in Karachi, Lahore-based artist and educator Salima Hashmi joining from Sri Lanka, Indian peace activist Lalita Ramdas, feminist Khushi Kabir in Dhaka, and Nepali journalist Namrata Sharma were among the participants who offered comments.

The discussion moved through Mohenjo-daro’s urban planning, the still-undeciphered Indus script, debates about its decline, and the danger of projecting modern national identities onto a civilisation that predates India and Pakistan.

Watch this: https://www.youtube.com/live/6Sbzn9OHO0s?si=YMwGpzkRYnPMl9Pd

Caption: The Southasia Peace Action Network 26 July discussion on Harappa Films’ award-winning documentary ‘Mohenjo daro: Unsealing an Ancient Indus City’ Moderated by Beena Sarwar with speakers: Omar Khan, Sudeshna Guha, and Sehba Sarwar

The temptation to let Mohenjo-daro and Harappa’s surviving architecture speak for the whole civilisation is understandable but that cannot easily reveal who held authority within its homes, whose labour sustained daily life, or whose choices were respected.

I kept returning to another question: What do we know about the women who lived there? 

The honest answer is that we do not know.

That uncertainty is one of the documentary’s strengths. It distinguishes what the archaeological record reveals from what it continues to withhold. Sometimes, what we cannot recover from history is as revealing as what survives.

A body interpreted by others

The small bronze figure known as the ‘Dancing Girl’—a label coined by archaeologist John Marshall after Ernest Mackay unearthed the figure at Mohenjo-daro in 1926—is among the most recognisable objects associated with the Indus Civilisation.

She stands with one hand on her hip and one arm covered in bangles. Her posture has been described as confident, defiant and self-assured. Yet even her familiar name is an interpretation. We do not know if she was a dancer, or whether she represents a real person, a performer, a worker, a deity or an artistic imagination.

Generations of archaeologists, historians, governments, artists and members of the public have projected meanings onto her.

That urge to interpret — and sometimes control — her body came to the fore when an altered image appeared in a new Indian school arts textbook. The figurine’s bare torso had been shaded over, making her appear clothed. Criticism from historians and academics led to India’s National Council of Educational Research and Training announcing on 16 June 2026 that the original image would be restored in the digital edition and in future printings. 

The controversy was about more than a textbook illustration. A body cast in bronze thousands of years ago had been subjected to the moral anxieties of the present. Someone had decided that the past itself needed to be made more “appropriate” for contemporary eyes.

This is where visibility meets autonomy. A woman’s body may be highly visible, but not on her own terms. Others name it, interpret it, judge it, cover it and decide what it is permitted to signify.

Autonomy is not only freedom from physical restraint. It is the power to define oneself, make choices, control one’s body and labour, claim resources, participate in decisions and be recognised as a full social actor rather than a symbol belonging to others.

We do not know whether women in Mohenjo-daro possessed such autonomy. But the controversy surrounding the bronze figure shows how readily authorities claim the power to define a female body.

Sehba Sarwar’s poem, ‘you live within us / mohenjodaro’s girl’, addresses the figurine as one who tells ‘the truth of women’s strength and resistance’. Sheema Kermani noted that the figurine’s posture opens a dance performance initially choreographed by her teacher, Guru Ghanshyam, which she later carried forward. Salima Hashmi invoked Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s English poem The Unicorn and the Dancing Girl, reflecting on Mohenjo-daro’s timelessness: “Time past is time present… we are so privileged to be in the continuum of that time.”

Their contributions moved the conversation from archaeology to art, memory and the ways an ancient female body continues to be interpreted, covered, reclaimed and brought to life in the present.

They also prompted a deeper question: While we debate the covering of one part of one ancient woman’s body, what about the countless women whose entire lives have disappeared?

Beyond the Famous Figurine

The ‘Dancing Girl’ is visible because bronze survived. Yet the absence of comparable evidence about other women does not mean they were absent from the civilisation, nor does it prove that they were oppressed, powerful or equal. Absence of evidence cannot responsibly be converted into evidence for whichever version of the past we prefer.

This does not mean women were absent from the civilisation. Nor does it prove that they were oppressed, powerful or equal. Absence of evidence cannot responsibly be converted into evidence for whichever version of the past we prefer.

Ancient civilisations are often recruited to validate modern political positions. Some imagine a lost golden age of gender equality. Others project contemporary ideas about modesty, hierarchy, religion or family order backwards onto people who cannot answer us.

Both approaches make the past serve the politics of the present.

A gender-conscious reading should not manufacture a feminist civilisation for which we lack evidence, nor assume that today’s restrictions existed in the same form thousands of years ago. It should ask why some forms of human experience are easier to recover than others.

The greatness of an ancient city is often measured by celebrating those who planned streets, engineered water systems, standardised weights and constructed public buildings.

But a civilisation is not sustained by engineering alone. It also depends upon the repetitive, intimate and frequently unrecorded work of keeping people alive: preparing food, raising children, producing clothing, maintaining living spaces, sharing knowledge and caring for those who are ill, elderly or vulnerable.

Across many societies, much of this labour has been assigned to women. We cannot assume that Mohenjo-daro followed the same arrangements. But the wider historical pattern helps explain why caring and domestic labour has so often been undervalued in accounts of political and economic achievement.

The question is not simply whether women appear in history. It is how they appear—and whether they are granted authority over their own meaning.

Are they recognised as historical actors or displayed as decorative figures? Do we encounter them as workers, thinkers, creators and decision-makers—or as symbols onto which ideas of beauty, purity, shame and civilisation are projected?

The male figure known as the ‘Priest-King’ is also surrounded by uncertainty. We do not know whether he was either a priest or a king. Yet the masculine title grants him religious and political authority, while the female figure is identified through her body and presumed performance.

One is imagined as governing. 

The other is imagined as dancing.

The contrast may reveal less about the social order of Mohenjo-daro than about our own habit of assigning authority to men and embodiment to women.

A History Older Than Borders

The Indus Civilisation cannot be contained within one modern national story. It flourished across areas now divided between Pakistan and India, long before either state existed.

The Sapan gathering reflected that shared inheritance: a filmmaker from Pakistan, a historian from India, and artists, activists and participants across South Asia and its diaspora discussing a civilisation that predates the borders separating us.

Archaeology can become another territory over which nations compete — whose civilisation, whose artefact, whose dance, whose history?

Mohenjo-daro offers South Asia an opportunity to look backwards without dividing the past into national possessions, and to recognise that the region’s cultural memory is older and more interconnected than its modern inheritors.

The Indus script remains undeciphered. We cannot read the words its people used to describe themselves, or know what they called their city, their political arrangements or the bronze figure that now travels through museums, textbooks, films, poetry and dance.

That uncertainty should produce humility. Responsible public history must distinguish evidence from interpretation and interpretation from imagination. Artists can enter those silences differently: A poem or dance performance need not claim to reconstruct an Indus woman’s life but can ask what an ancient object awakens in the present.

Perhaps that is why the ‘Dancing Girl’ remains so compelling. She cannot explain herself, while archaeologists, textbook editors, historians, nationalists, poets, dancers and journalists attempt to explain her.

Mohenjo-daro also asks how future generations will understand us.

Will they encounter women mainly through laws passed about them, crimes committed against them, images circulated of them and arguments conducted over their bodies? Or will they find women’s own journalism, scholarship, testimony, organising, art and accounts of everyday life?

Across Southasia, women continue to be treated as bearers of family honour, religious identity, cultural authenticity and national pride. Their autonomy is often treated not as their own, but as territory over which families, communities and institutions claim authority.

Visibility alone is not liberation. A woman may be highly visible as an image, controversy, victim or symbol, while remaining unseen as a complete human being with knowledge, judgement and the right to define her own life.

The answer is not to make assumptions about the women of Mohenjo-daro, but to recognise the silence surrounding them — and ensure that we do not reproduce it around women living now.

The ancient bronze figure survived because metal endured. Her uncertainty reminds us of all the women history cannot show us.

The task before us is to make sure that women’s lives — and their authority over their own stories — are not left among the ruins.

(The author is a journalist, author, and PhD researcher at SOAS, University of London. Her doctoral research examines misogyny as political radicalisation across South Asia and diaspora contexts, with a focus on digital hate and honour-based violence. By special arrangement with Sapan)