NCERT's 'Dancing Girl' Censorship Sparks Debate on Objectification and the Essence of Relics

I see naked people.

NCERT director Dinesh Saklani may have told reporters that the image of the Mohenjo-daro 'Dancing Girl,' whose torso was covered with dark shading in a new edition of a CBSE Class 9, will be restored to its original kitless format. But the damage has already been done.

Before NCERT's ogle-police drew attention to the original hipster, I never noticed her being anything but a figure emanating immense cool and swag, with her right hand on her hip and 'meh' vibes. Now, all I can think about is her not wearing a stitch. And like that irritatingly whiney boy who sees dead people in M Night Shyamalan's 1999 movie, The Sixth Sense, I now see naked people everywhere thanks to NCERT.

Now, objectification of humans - especially of women as a 'sex object' - has come a long way, baby, since the first beauty pageant. Such a unidimensional way of seeing a person has not only come to be seen (at least publicly) as offensive, but a sure sign of being a loutish yokel.

But as objectifying persons go, personifying objects also has a rich history, a glimpse of which I recently got in a magnificent show, 'The Light and the Lotus: Relics of the Awakened One' at Delhi's Rai Pithora Cultural Complex in Lado Sarai.

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Organised by the ministry of culture, its centrepiece comprises relics and semiprecious stones that William Caxton Peppe, an estate manager near Gorakhpur, excavated in 1898 at Piprahwa in UP, less than 10 km away from a similar site at Lumbini in Nepal. Along with other objects, including carved figures, which were found in that first and subsequent digs in the 1970s and 1980s were five stone reliquaries - specially designed containers that store and protect sacred relics.

One of them contained a stone container, an urn, with an inscription on its top in Brahmi script that roughly says: 'This deposit of the corporeal relics of the Blessed Buddha is [the gift] of the Sukiti brothers, together with their sisters, sons and wives. Of the Shakyas.'

Staring at the kettle-sized 5th-6th c BC casket behind the glass, it was impossible for me not to feel the sheer spacetime shimmer and ripple of the Buddha Shakyamuni. Containing his bone relics and ash, the urn becomes two degrees of separation from an object of reverence that was a man who lived more than 2,500 years ago.

If the exhibition was magnificent, being armed with Marg magazine's December 2025 issue, 'Crystal & Ash: The Buddha at Piprahwa,' was to be weaponised with background and context by scholars regarding what I was seeing inside the stupa-shaped gallery. Edited by eloquent art historian Naman P Ahuja, this exquisitely produced collector's edition not only takes you behind (and below) the scenes of Piprahwa's Buddhist relics, but actually digs into something deeper: how objects can be imbued with person-ality.

In his searching essay, 'Bemused by Buddha's Bones: The Riddle of Relics,' literary and material historian Peter Skilling questions the very term 'relic,' which conjures up a very different object that's more European/Christian in origin - the sort of religio-commercial industry akin to our sports and celebrity merchandising culture that gave rise to Protestantism in the early 16th c.

Skilling prefers to use the Sanskrit term 'sharira', the respect and adoration of which was 'one of the engines that drove Buddha Dharma across India and beyond its cultural borders'. He describes it as 'powerful compactions of spiritual essence... not straightforward material artefacts sourced from Gautama the Buddha's physical body. Relic practices are expressions of veneration for and devotion to a Buddha's or a holy person's physical remains.' Much like the lock of Maradona's hair kept in a square glass box at Bar Nilo in Naples.

Fascinating essays by Sanskrit and Buddhist scholar Ingo Strauch, historian Himanshu Prabha Ray, Ahuja himself, and others not only through a light - and some welcome spanners - on how one can negotiate with the past, but also how objects are not mere fan boy collectibles or even time capsules, but powerful manifestations of a person. Whether it be a founder of a faith, or a spunky girl who never really took to clothes.

Catch 'The Light and the Lotus' that's on till July 3 if you can. It's bound to leave you more enlightened than textbooks ever can.