Srinagar, July 11 -- She stands eleven centimetres tall, weighs less than a mango, and has spent the last century making grown institutions nervous.

The bronze figure known as the Dancing Girl came out of the ground in 1926, and she has been on trial ever since, most recently before the committee deciding whether Indian schoolchildren should get to see her at all.

The charge, essentially, is nudity.

The defense, if she could mount one, would point out that she predates the concept by roughly four and a half thousand years.

Ernest Mackay found her while digging through Mohenjo-daro, a Bronze Age city in what is now Sindh, Pakistan, whose name translates loosely to Mound of the Dead.

The excavation ran under the Archaeological Survey o...