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.