Beginning with an analysis of William Prinsep’s watercolour of nautch dancers (circa 1840), this chapter discusses the figure of the Indian nautch dancer as ‘homo sacer’, the killable target of anti-nautch dance bans introduced in British colonial India. It focuses on the British-controlled colonial city of Calcutta, a dynamic and experimental hub in nineteenth-century undivided Bengal, where the management of native populations, including sex workers and dancers, were led by colonial-era scientific and commercial agendas, and which resulted in an intersectional race-gender-caste-based violence against professional nautch women. Examining a series of newspaper reports from the colonial archive that prominently feature nautch events, the chapter tracks changing British attitudes towards nautch dancing, ranging from mild tolerance to total denouncement. A ‘corpo-active’ method of re-animating nautch archives through the body is introduced as a framework for the book, which resurfaces nautch subjects from visual and material archives as active agents rather than passive victims of tragedy. Overall, the chapter provides an overview of three broad tendencies against or with which the whole book moves: nautch as contagion, nautch as disappearance and nautch as ‘survivance’.