In June 2026, something unusual turned up in Madhurima, the new Class 9 Arts Education textbook that NCERT introduced under the National Education Policy. The Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-daro, a bronze figurine roughly 4,500 years old and among the most recognisable artefacts to survive the Indus Valley Civilisation, appeared in the book with her torso shaded over, giving her the appearance of being clothed. The original carries no such covering and sits, unaltered, in the National Museum in New Delhi. What made the change harder to explain was that the same figurine appears without any modification in NCERT's own Class 6 Social Science textbook, where it has featured for well over two decades. Historians and educators were quick to call the alteration out as unnecessary censorship that distorted an established archaeological record.^[1]

When the matter was put to NCERT, its Director offered little beyond saying there was no specific reason for the change, and pointed enquirers toward the textbook's development team.^[2] Within days, once the Education Ministry sought an explanation, NCERT confirmed that the original image would be restored in future editions and in the textbook's digital version.^[3] Most people who followed the story treated that as the end of it.

It should not be. What this episode actually shows is that a body with quasi-regulatory authority over the national curriculum altered a heritage artefact in a way that touches obscenity law directly, did so without any recorded legal reasoning, and reversed itself only once the matter drew public attention, not because anyone within the institution paused to ask whether the law required the change at all. Resolving the controversy is not the same as fixing what allowed it to happen.

The Legal Question NCERT Never Asked

Historian Michel Danino, who headed the committee that developed NCERT's Class 6 Social Science books, called the alteration an act of censorship, and went further, describing it as the creation of a fake artefact that exists nowhere. His objection was framed around historical accuracy, but it points, perhaps without meaning to, at a legal failure as well. Nobody at NCERT appears to have asked whether Indian law actually required, or even permitted, an alteration of this kind.

The governing standard for obscenity in India comes from Section 292 of the Indian Penal Code.^[4] Under that provision, as the Supreme Court has interpreted it over several decades, material is obscene only if it is lascivious, appeals to prurient interest, and tends to deprave or corrupt the persons likely to see it. These conditions have to be met together, not in the alternative, and the absence of even one defeats an obscenity claim.

None of that applies to the Dancing Girl. She is an archaeological object, about four inches in height, placed in the textbook to explain lost-wax metal casting and the artistic sensibilities of the Indus Valley people. There is nothing sexual about the context in which she appears, nothing suggestive, nothing that could plausibly excite prurient interest in an ordinary reader. NCERT was not legally required to alter her image. If anything, it answered a question the law never asked.

Tracing the Doctrine, from Hicklin to Apoorva Arora

Indian obscenity law took several decades to arrive at this position, which is what makes NCERT's decision sit so oddly against that history. In Ranjit D. Udeshi v. State of Maharashtra, the Supreme Court upheld Section 292 as a valid restriction on speech, but tested obscenity using the Hicklin standard, borrowed from the English case Regina v. Hicklin, which judged material by its effect on the most susceptible reader and allowed isolated passages to be read out of context.^[5] That approach, weighted heavily toward presumed harm and indifferent to intent or audience, remained the law in India for close to five decades.

It gave way in Aveek Sarkar v. State of West Bengal, where the Court finally adopted what is now known as the community standard test.^[6] The bench held that a nude or semi-nude image of a woman cannot, by itself, be treated as obscene unless it has a tendency to arouse feeling or reflects a design to excite sexual passion. The case concerned a photograph of Boris Becker posing semi-nude with his fiancee Barbara Feltus, published in India as part of a statement against apartheid. The Court quashed the obscenity complaint against it, holding that the image, read in its full context, conveyed a message rather than titillation. What mattered was what the picture was doing, not merely what it showed, and that is exactly the inquiry NCERT skipped.

The same contextual approach had already surfaced a few years earlier in Bobby Art International v. Om Pal Singh Hoon, where the Court held that scenes of enforced nudity in Bandit Queen were not obscene because their function was to convey humiliation, not to titillate.^[7] The Kerala High Court applied similar reasoning more recently, refusing to treat a magazine cover showing a mother breastfeeding her child as obscene, observing that offending someone's sensibilities is simply not the same as meeting the legal threshold for obscenity. Context, in other words, does not merely soften an obscenity finding; it can determine whether there is one to make at all.

More recently, in Apoorva Arora v. State (Govt. of NCT of Delhi), the Court quashed proceedings against the makers of the web series College Romance, holding that Section 292 does not ask whether content is offensive but whether it meets the three conditions set out above.^[8] NCERT's error in the Madhurima episode tracks this almost exactly. It asked whether an image might embarrass someone. That was never the legal question to begin with.

A Jurisprudential Undercurrent

There is an older debate sitting underneath all of this, one that legal philosophy has argued over for decades. Lord Devlin took the view that a society is entitled to enforce its shared morality through law, since common morality is part of what holds a community together. H.L.A. Hart pushed back, arguing from Mill's harm principle that offence or discomfort on its own cannot justify legal restriction, and that actual harm has to be shown. India's community standard test, as laid down in Aveek Sarkar, leans firmly toward Hart's position: the law asks for a tendency to deprave or corrupt, not simply a risk of offending someone. NCERT's own decision, made quietly and without any documented reasoning, reads more like Devlin's approach than Hart's, an assumption that something might offend, acted on without ever testing that assumption against the standard courts have actually laid down.

The Woman the Framework Cannot Contain

There is also something worth noticing here beyond doctrine. Latika Vashist, writing on Aveek Sarkar, has pointed out that even the more liberal obscenity judgments tend to protect nudity only when it fits a familiar, sanctioned relationship. In her words, the image in that case got protection only because it neatly fit into the heteronormative framework, remaining within the bound of licit love entrenched within familial ideology, a chaste wife covered by the arms of her husband, under the eyes of her father.^[9]

The Dancing Girl does not fit that mould at all. She stands by herself, hand resting on her hip, in a posture that resists being read as belonging to anyone. No arm covers her. No domestic or romantic frame explains her presence. She is simply a woman, cast in bronze by a civilisation that apparently felt no need to clothe her. An institution uncomfortable with that kind of self-possession cannot point to the law to justify covering it up, because the law, as it currently stands, offers no such cover.

The Gap That Remains

Restoring the original image was the right call. It does not, however, close the gap that made the alteration possible in the first place. There is still no published policy governing when or how heritage artefacts may be visually modified for use in school textbooks, no criteria for what counts as age-appropriate in relation to archaeological material, and no authority formally tasked with making that call.

The Ministry of Education would do well to direct NCERT toward drafting exactly such a policy, one built on the community standard test from Aveek Sarkar, treating archaeological and educational value as factors that weigh in favour of retaining an artefact's original form. Without something of that kind in writing, the next committee that finds an artefact inconvenient will have just as much room to improvise as this one did.

The Dancing Girl has lasted 4,500 years without anyone's protection. She did not need NCERT's either. What Indian educational governance still needs is a framework that ensures a decision like this one is never taken again without a reasoned, documented basis capable of surviving scrutiny.

1. Dancing Girl Controversy: Revisiting Harappa's Iconic Artefact, Its Many Meanings, The Indian Express (June 2026). ↑

2. 'Dancing Girl,' a 4500 Year Old Statue, Censored in NCERT Art Textbook, The Quint (June 2026). ↑

3. Ritika Chopra, NCERT to Restore Nude Mohenjo-daro 'Dancing Girl' Image in Class 9 Arts Textbook: Express Impact, The Indian Express (June 17, 2026). ↑

4. The Indian Penal Code, 1860, § 292, No. 45, Acts of Parliament, 1860 (India). ↑

5. Ranjit D. Udeshi v. State of Maharashtra, AIR 1965 SC 881 (India); Regina v. Hicklin, (1868) LR 3 QB 360; see generally Navigating the Jurisprudence of Obscenity Laws in and around India: An Examination of Legal Interpretations, LiveLaw (Oct. 23, 2023), https://www.livelaw.in/lawschool/articles/navigating-the-jurisprudence-of-obscenity-laws-in-and-around-india-an-examination-of-legal-interpretations-240830. ↑

6. Aveek Sarkar v. State of West Bengal, (2014) 4 SCC 257 (India); see also Dr. Mariamma A.K., Comment on Aveek Sarkar & Another v. State of West Bengal & Others, LiveLaw (July 22, 2020), https://www.livelaw.in/comment-aveek-sarkar-another-v-state-west-bengal-others. ↑

7. Bobby Art Int'l v. Om Pal Singh Hoon, (1996) 4 SCC 1 (India); 'One Man's Vulgarity Is Other Man's Lyric': Kerala HC Refuses To Declare Breastfeeding Woman On Magazine's Cover As Obscene, LiveLaw (Nov. 7, 2021), https://www.livelaw.in/one-mans-vulgarity-is-other-mans-lyric-kerala-hc-refuses-to-declare-breastfeeding-woman-on-magazines-cover-as-obscene/. ↑

8. Apoorva Arora v. State (Govt. of NCT of Delhi), 2024 INSC 223 : 2024 LiveLaw (SC) 243 (India); Supreme Court Quarterly Digest -Indian Penal Code [Jan-Mar, 2024], LiveLaw (May 25, 2024), https://www.livelaw.in/supreme-court/supreme-court-judgment-indian-penal-code-quarterly-digest-2024-258848. ↑

9. Latika Vashist, Law and the Obscene Image: Reading Aveek Sarkar v. State of West Bengal, 5 J. Indian L. and Soc'y 248, 252 (Monsoon 2014). ↑