‘Mohenjo Daro’ Poster Has Left This History Scholar Flabbergasted

Ashutosh Gowariker needs to explain how women in the Harappan civilisation had access to hair removal products.

A poster of Mohenjo Daro. (Photo: Twitter/ Ruchika Sharma)

Our obsession and subsequent glorification of the white skin has often been credited to the age-old “colonial burden”, a phrase we use conveniently to hide destructive stereotypes and biases. And popular culture portrayals have fed into these stereotypes more often than we think.

That’s why, when the first posters of Ashutosh Gowariker’s Mohenjo Daro were released, this history scholar could not help but point out the hackneyed formula of having a fair actor portray the role of a woman from an ancient civilisation. And even though there isn’t any evidence of how they looked, this portrayal could be historically wrong.

Ruchika Sharma, an aspiring archeologist and an MPhil student at JNU with a specialisation in Medieval Indian history took to Twitter to rip apart the film’s poster.

The poster, she says, reeks of an oriental bias and also has its historical details all wrong.

There, she said it. Our fair-and-lovely bias manages to creep into everything. Even films that claim to be historically accurate.

Gowariker has mentioned in his interviews that he consulted and worked with several historians and archaeologists to maintain factual precision. We wonder if he managed to run his posters by them, at all.