| The British Empire created powerful cultural intimacies and interactions which were the inevitable result of colonizers interacting with the colonized. British dominion over the subcontinent of India brought them into contact with a group known as the nautch girls. The nautch girls were the ultimate in performance entertainment and cultural showmanship that were purveyed in a variety of South Asian empires. The cultural intimacies between colonizer and colonized resulted in a spectacular counterflow to the empire. Utilizing the methodologies of colonial discourse theory, subaltern studies, critical analysis, and close reading, this thesis examines and explores the nautch girls and how they continually showed the inherent paradoxes and internal contradictions of the British Empire through their agency and soft power. I will utilize critical analysis in uniting historiographic and qualitative case studies to analyze and expose the potent subaltern nautch girl as a serious distortion of power within the British Empire |