Dastaan-E-UP
You arrive in Banaras before dawn, when the river is still grey and the first bells are ringing down the ghats.
The brief
You arrive in Banaras before dawn, when the river is still grey and the first bells are ringing down the ghats. By evening you are in Lucknow, where even an argument is conducted with perfect manners. In between lie mustard fields and village fairs, the songs of Braj and the drums of Awadh, and stories older than any map.
Uttar Pradesh is not one place. It is a library with its doors left open. Come in, and mind the step: the floor is centuries deep.
The dastaan comes home
Dastaan-E-UP is the next chapter of the Dastaan-E Project, The Roots India’s signature body of work, and in many ways it is a homecoming. The art of the dastaan reached its height in nineteenth-century Lucknow, where tellers spun epics of kings, tricksters and enchanted worlds for nights on end, and where those tales were finally printed in volume after volume, thick enough to stop a door. If Delhi gave the dastaan a home, Lucknow gave it a stage.
This play returns the tradition to the land that loved it most. It does not try to capture all of Uttar Pradesh, an impossible task for any stage. Instead, it listens to the state the way a teller listens to a crowd, picking up a thread here and a song there, until a single tale emerges from a hundred voices.
Five stops on the road
Banaras, at dawn. One of the oldest living cities on earth, where life and death share the same riverbank. Kabir argued with priests and mullahs here, Tulsidas retold the Ramayana in the language of ordinary people, and a shehnai can still be heard drifting over the ghats. Banaras teaches that faith and doubt can sit side by side on the same step.
Prayagraj, at the confluence. Where the Ganga meets the Yamuna and, in belief, a third river no one can see. Every twelve years, the Kumbh turns this riverbank into one of the largest gatherings of humanity anywhere. Prayag is the place of meetings: of rivers, of pilgrims, of ideas.
Braj, in colour. Mathura and Vrindavan, where every lane remembers Krishna’s childhood and Holi is not a day but a season. Here devotion does not sit still. It sings, it dances, and it throws colour at strangers.
Lucknow, at dusk. The city of tehzeeb, where “pehle aap” is a philosophy and chikankari is still stitched by hand. Thumri and kathak once filled the courts of the nawabs, and the scarred walls of the Residency still remember 1857.
The village, at harvest. Beyond the cities lies the Uttar Pradesh most stories forget: the chaupal under the neem tree, the Alha sung at monsoon fairs, the Nautanki stage lit by lanterns, and the wedding songs that carry a family’s history from one generation to the next.
The play does not visit them in order. Like any good journey, it takes detours.
The travellers
Every traveller on this road carries something. A boatman on the Ganga carries the ashes and secrets of strangers, and long ago stopped asking whose they are. An embroiderer in an old Lucknow lane carries a pattern her grandmother taught her, one patient stitch at a time. A Nautanki actress carries songs the cities have forgotten, on a stage that grows smaller every year. And a young graduate on the night train out of the state carries everything he owns in a single bag, along with a home he cannot quite leave behind.
Their paths cross at a ghat, a fair and a railway platform, in ways none of them expect. Where their roads lead, we will not say. That is what the play is for.
How the tale was made
The map. Every journey starts with a map, and ours was drawn from books, archives and conversations. We read the region’s poets and saints, from Kabir’s sharp couplets to the refined verse of Lucknow. We studied its folk forms, from Nautanki and Alha to the songs women sing at weddings. And we listened to people who carry Uttar Pradesh in their accents, recipes and memories, wherever they live now.
The fellow travellers. We did not want to make this journey alone. In workshops, students brought their own UP into the room: a grandparent’s village, a festival they never miss, a phrase in Awadhi or Bhojpuri that has no translation. Their stories and dialogues became part of the script, so the play speaks in many accents, just as the state does.
The songs for the road. Our songs were written and composed in-house, drawing on the region’s extraordinary musical memory: the devotion of bhajan and qawwali, the playfulness of Braj’s Holi songs, the ache of thumri, the earthy pulse of folk. Each went through draft after draft until it sounded less like something we wrote and more like something we found.
Dressing the journey. Costume began with the region’s own hands. Mood boards gathered chikankari, Banarasi weaves, block prints and the plain cotton of the fields. Sketches and fabric trials followed, and colour palettes were built for each stop on the road, from the saffron haze of a Banaras dawn to the soft ivory of a Lucknow evening.
Arriving. On stage, the journey becomes the structure. Scenes move like a train through changing landscapes, and the audience travels with them, so that by the end they have not simply watched Uttar Pradesh. They have crossed it.
Safar mubarak.
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