Imperial literature paired the railway and the nautch girl as paired cliches of India

Evidence

Rosie has tried to lift herself from the patriarchal ethnos by going the route of institutional Western education. But dancing is in her blood. If the railway train as a harbinger of progress and class mobility is a cliche of the literature of imperialism, the nautch (dance) girl is a cliche of the imagining of British India. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 1978

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: British possession of India constrained imaginative writing about the Orient — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 428

Broader Connections

• British possession of India constrained imaginative writing about the Orient #expands (0.80) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 428