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’.

The chapter begins with a survey of literature on nineteenth-century colonial exhibitions and world’s fairs as a cultural practice and the complicity of academic disciplines such as anthropology and ethnology in promoting violent forms of pedagogy. It provides a brief overview of the ‘nasty’ Indian nautch, a racially charged practice framed simultaneously by colonial desire and abhorrence, which moved between the Empire’s exhibitions and theatres as disturbances. It then examines one particular colonial exhibition, the failed Liberty of London’s 1885 exhibition, and specifically analyses the work of nautch dancers whose moving bodies both engaged and disrupted the scopophilia framing live human exhibits. The chapter then listens to the dissenting voices of Liberty’s performers and delves into the legal proceedings they set in motion against their producers. In the final section, the chapter examines how re-imagining the Liberty’s nautch experience by embodying archival silences and slippages might be a usefully anarchic ‘corpo-active’ method that animates the memories of subaltern dancers forgotten by both British and Indian nationalist history.

This chapter examines the material trace – a scrapbook – belonging to a once-celebrated Bengali courtesan, Indubala Dasi (1899-1984). Part I, ‘My Name is Indubala!’, introduces Indubala’s life as a singer, actress and performer, and her activism in the domain of sexual labour rights in Calcutta’s red-light district. Part II, ‘Indubala’s Scrapbook’, offers a detailed analysis of the contents of her scrapbook. It reveals how the carefully curated documents within this quiet and intimate archive gives evidence of a dynamic homosocial world. Part III, ‘Lean Worlds, Voracious Bodies’, uses a multi-page party menu from the scrapbook to reflect on Bengali courtesan women’s appetite in colonial India. The concluding section examines amod (pleasure) and alladi (indulgence) – words found in the invitation cards inside the scrapbook – as coalitional strategies, affective states of organised inner-world resistance that Bengali courtesans and sex workers as queered subjects mobilised not just to survive but also to thrive in the world. This exuberance disrupts the trope of the ‘tragic courtesan’, offering an alternative view of Bengali courtesans as women who did not just endure the world but also curated other joyous ways of being in the world.

The concluding chapter offers three short ethnographic accounts of dance events in twenty-first-century Kolkata to argue how nautch has an afterlife. It persists, despite sustained bureaucratic attempts to legally annihilate it. It continues to be carried by bodies under compulsion and bodies with volition. Nautch has morphed into modern-day baiji dances in private rooms and into choreographed spectacles on public stages. A dance and performance studies lens shows how nautch has endured as a profession, a form of waged labour at times shrouded in secrecy, and in other moments displayed proudly in civic spaces. Its legacy of stigma hangs like a curse on multiple professional dance communities across India, who continue to grapple with the shame that accompanies a life of dancing, as other scholars have found. But the afterlife of nautch also features insistent and localised revolutionary movements, such as those led by sex workers’ collective Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC) and its cultural wing Komal Gandhar in Kolkata. The chapter ends with a discussion of how Komal Gandhar’s dancing collectively activates spaces of possibilities, of new forms of decriminalised citizenship and of more equitable futures of social belonging.

This chapter examines the fictions of nautch dancers painted by local artists (patuas) in nineteenth-century Kalighat paintings from Bengal. Part I, ‘Bazaar Art, Bazaari Women’, highlights key features and techniques of Kalighat paintings in representing the female/courtesan figure (or Bibi). Part II, ‘Patuas and Performance’, discusses the intimacy between visual and performance worlds in Kalighat paintings, noticing how patuas borrowed gestures and bodies from Bengal’s performance forms such as jatra and khemta. Through contemporary social satires and reviews produced by caste-privileged, Bengali male authors, the chapter tracks a growing anti-nautch narrative targeting the baiji and khemta dancers of Bengal whilst popular circulation of their imagery through Kalighat paintings flourished. Part III, ‘Murdering Dance’, examines two real murders: the 1873 Tarakeshwar case, a sensational event that rocked Calcutta and was captured in several notable Kalighat paintings, and the 1875 Sonagachi murder case of Golap, a sex worker in Calcutta. Visual traces of these two murders are read as part of an anti-nautch discourse in which colonial law and native patriarchy centred violence against a dancer’s body within debates on female sexual desire and deviance, and against which subaltern women performed their insurgent gestures of refusal.

This chapter maps the prolific appearance of nautch sundaris (beauties) and jans (beloveds) in South Asian popular visual culture in a period of growing anti-colonial nationalism and anti-nautch regulation in India. Visual traces of dancer-actresses are studied alongside established theatre history primary texts to re-presence the overlooked labour of dancing, a fundamental part of innovative and seditious vernacular dramaturgies that inaugurated modern Bengali drama. Part I, ‘The Age of Mechanical Reprodarshan’, narrates the intimacy of the red-light district and the popular printing presses of Kansaripara Art Studio and Chorebagan Art Studio in Calcutta. It argues that actress-dancers proliferated in print in the unique visual participatory space of darshan. Part II, ‘The Sundaris (Beauties)’ traces the many sundaris – real and fictional – appearing in popular visual prints and in Calcutta’s theatres. Part III, ‘The Jans (Beloveds)’ examines nautch on the humble and ubiquitous matchbox label. A reading of the real and fictional beloveds – Khorshed Jan, Pokhraj Jan, Sanichar Jan, Bani Jan and the celebrated Gauhar Jan (1873 –1930) – explores how the circulation of the Jan series on matchboxes brought about a change in modes of patronage and spectatorship for nautch in the subcontinent in the early twentieth century.