Workshop Wonders: Transforming Schools with Performance Art

Daastan-E-Dilli I have been called by many names: Indraprastha, Shahjahanabad, Dilli, Delhi. Each was given to me by someone who believed I would be theirs forever. Kings raised their forts on my rocks and laid their tombs in my gardens; poets wrote me love letters and elegies in the same breath. I have been conquered, looted, mourned and rebuilt so many times that I no longer count the ruins. I simply grow around them.

I have opened my lanes to traders and saints, to soldiers and refugees, to anyone who arrived with nothing and stayed long enough to call me home. I have heard the azaan and the temple bell, the qawwal's cry and the hawker's call, the clatter of tongas and now the hum of the Metro, and I have kept every sound. Empires forget. I do not.

Through all of it, I have kept my stories. Not in my stones, which crumble, but in my people, who carry me from grandmother to grandchild and from one lane to the next. Sit with me a while. The chai is hot, the evening is long, and there is a tale waiting. Let me tell you one.

Why tell a city

Every city has an official biography. It lives in textbooks and on plaques, in the dates of battles and the names of dynasties, and it is almost always told from above, by the people who built the forts rather than the people who lived in their shadow. Dastaan-E Dilli, a chapter of The Roots India's Dastaan-E Project, begins from the suspicion that this official story is the least interesting thing about Delhi.

The real city lives somewhere else. It lives in the way a grandmother gives directions by landmarks that no longer exist, in the recipe that crossed a border in 1947, in the couplet a rickshaw driver quotes without knowing who wrote it. Delhi's history is not only written in stone; it is spoken, sung, argued over and passed on. The question this play asks is simple and enormous at once: what would it mean to tell Delhi's story the way Delhi tells it to itself?

This essay follows that question through the making of the play: the tradition it borrows from, the city it tries to hold, the choices that shaped it, and the long, collaborative process of turning a thousand years of memory into a single evening of theatre.

The art of the dastaan

Long before cinema or television, the people of Delhi gathered to hear stories told aloud. The dastaan, a word that simply means a tale, came to the subcontinent from the Persian world and grew into one of its great performance traditions: dastangoi, the art of telling the dastaan. Its most famous epic followed the adventures of Amir Hamza through battles, enchanted lands, sorcerers and clever tricksters, and it was long enough to fill not one evening but hundreds.

What made the tradition remarkable was not only the stories but the way they were told. The teller needed no stage, no set and no costume changes. With a voice, a gesture and an extraordinary memory, he could conjure a palace, a war or a magic city in a crowded courtyard. He improvised constantly, stretching a scene when the audience leaned in and cutting it short when they grew restless. Every telling was different, because every audience was different. The story did not belong to the teller alone; it was made in the space between him and his listeners.

Delhi and Lucknow were the tradition's great homes. By the early twentieth century, however, the art had all but disappeared, and for decades it survived mainly in printed volumes, until a new generation of performers revived it in Delhi in the 2000s. Dastaan-E Dilli does not reproduce the form exactly. It inherits its spirit: the conviction that a story is a living thing, shaped by those who hear it, and that a city can be summoned with nothing more than voices and the imagination of a crowd.

A city written many times

It is often said that Delhi has been built seven times, and some count more. Each ruler who claimed it seemed to want a city of his own: a fort on the rocky ridge, a walled capital on the plain, a new citadel a few miles from the last. The Mughal emperor Shah Jahan built Shahjahanabad, with the Red Fort and the great mosque at its heart, and the British later laid out New Delhi beside it. Each new Delhi rose on, beside or out of the ruins of the old, so that the city today is less a single place than a manuscript written over again and again, with the earlier words still showing through.

The people were layered too. Sufi saints settled here and drew devotees from across the subcontinent. Poets like Ghalib lived through the city's glory and its devastation in 1857, and wrote letters mourning a Delhi they no longer recognised. In 1947, Partition brought hundreds of thousands of refugees who arrived with almost nothing and built new neighbourhoods, new markets and new lives. Since then, people from every corner of India have made the city their own, adding their languages, festivals and food to its mix.

This is what makes Delhi such a rich and difficult subject for the stage. It is not one story but many, often contradictory and all true at once. A play about Delhi cannot pretend the city is simple. It has to find a way to hold its layers without flattening them.

The challenge

Every production begins with a problem, and this one began with several.

The first was scale. A thousand years of history, dozens of rulers and countless communities cannot fit on one stage, and any attempt to squeeze them in would become a hurried timeline, the theatrical equivalent of a textbook chapter read aloud.

The second was distance. For young audiences especially, history often feels like something that happened to other people, long ago and somewhere else. The Red Fort is a school trip, not a story. The task was to close the gap between the city in the history books and the city waiting outside the auditorium door.

The third was balance. Delhi's past includes conquest and loss, migration and displacement, and many of its stories still matter deeply to the families who carry them. A play about the city had to be honest about those histories without reducing anyone to a villain or a victim.

The fourth was form. The production had to be lively enough to hold a young audience, rich enough to reward an older one, and simple enough to live on a real stage with real resources, where imagination has to do the work that budgets cannot.

The approach: voices, not rulers

The answer to all four problems turned out to be a single decision: tell the city through its people rather than its power.

Instead of a parade of emperors, the play follows ordinary lives drawn from across Delhi's many eras. A poet in a crumbling haveli counts what his city has lost. A trader in a bazaar that has outlived every crown haggles exactly as his grandfather did. A family that arrived with nothing plants a tree it may never sit beneath. A young Delhiite today hurries past a thousand years without looking up. None of them changes the course of history. All of them are changed by it, and that is precisely what makes them recognisable.

The second decision was to abandon chronology. Memory does not move in a straight line, and neither does the play. Scenes echo one another across centuries: a farewell in one era answers a homecoming in another, and a song from a Mughal courtyard returns, transformed, on a modern street. The audience is not marched through history. They drift through it, the way one drifts through Delhi itself, turning a corner and stepping into another age.

The third decision was to let the city speak. Delhi itself becomes the narrator, the oldest storyteller of all, a voice that has watched everyone come and go and kept every story. This framing honours the dastaan tradition, in which a single teller holds a whole world together, and it gives young audiences a guide who is wise, witty and a little heartbroken all at once.

The process: research and listening

The work began the way any teller's does, by listening. The team read the city's histories, from accounts of its sultanates and the Mughal court to the chronicles of 1857 and the memoirs of Partition. They read its poetry, because Delhi's poets have often recorded its moods more truthfully than its historians. They gathered its folklore: the legends attached to monuments, the ghost stories of old havelis, the sayings that only make sense in Purani Dilli.

Books, however, were only half the archive. The other half walked the streets. The team sought out people who had watched the city change: shopkeepers whose families had kept the same stall for generations, elders who remembered Delhi before the flyovers, families whose stories began on a refugee train. These conversations were less about facts than about texture: what the city smelled like, what people feared, what they missed and what made them laugh.

From all of this, the team looked for moments rather than dates. A city remembers in moments, and so does a good story. The night a bazaar went dark. The morning a train of refugees arrived. The evening a qawwali moved a stranger to tears. These moments became the raw material from which every scene was eventually built.

The process: students in the room

A play about a living city could not be written entirely from the outside. So the writing room was opened to students, and through a series of workshops they became co-authors of the city on stage.

The workshops began with a simple prompt: tell us your Delhi. Not the Delhi of the textbook, but the lane you grew up on, the shop that has known you since you were small, the story your grandparents tell over and over. Students mapped their neighbourhoods, spoke to their families, and brought back fragments no archive could have supplied: a great-grandmother's journey across the border, a festival celebrated in a shared courtyard, the old name a street still goes by even though the map calls it something else.

Then they turned those fragments into theatre. Through writing exercises, improvisation and storytelling games, students shaped their material into scenes and dialogue. Some of it found its way directly into the script; some of it shaped characters, lines and moments in subtler ways. The result is a play in which the city on stage belongs as much to the young people performing it as to the team that wrote it.

This was not inclusion for its own sake. It changed the play. The students' Delhi is funnier, messier and more tender than any adult would have written it. It is also more contemporary, and that is exactly what allows the past to land. When a student recognises their own grandmother in a scene from 1947, history stops being history and becomes family.

The process: music, costume and staging

Music. If Delhi has a soundtrack, it is a layered one: the qawwali of the Sufi shrines, the ghazals of its poets, the calls of the bazaar, the clatter of the old city and the hum of the new. The play's songs were written and composed in-house by Team Roots, drawing on that musical memory rather than borrowing from it. The lyrics took inspiration from the city's poetic inheritance and its everyday speech, while the melodies moved between classical foundations and the rhythms of the street. Each song went through draft after draft until it felt as though the city had always been humming it. In performance, the music does more than accompany the action. It carries the audience across centuries in a single phrase, and lets a melody from one era return, changed, in another.

Costume. Dressing a play that spans centuries is its own act of history-writing. The costume process began with research into how Delhi has dressed across its eras and communities: the courtly fabrics of the Mughal period, the plain cottons of the bazaar, the clothes refugees arrived in, the denim and kurtas of today. Mood boards gathered references for each world; art designs and character sketches turned those references into a coherent visual language; fabrics were chosen for texture, weight and period; and colour palettes were built so that each era reads at a glance. Because many performers move between eras, costumes were designed to layer and transform quickly, so that a single shawl or headpiece can carry an actor from one century to the next.

Staging. The central staging idea is simple: centuries share the same space. Rather than changing elaborate sets for each period, the stage remains a single open city, and light, sound, costume and movement do the work of travelling through time. Past and present often stand side by side; a modern commuter and an old-city trader may cross paths without noticing each other, just as the city's eras coexist on its streets today. The city's own voice binds these fragments together, guiding the audience as the story wanders. The effect is not a history lesson but an immersion. The audience does not watch Delhi's past from a distance; they find themselves standing inside it.

What the dastaan asks of its audience

A dastaan has never been a passive experience. In the old courtyards, listeners gasped, laughed, argued and came back the next night. Dastaan-E Dilli asks something similar of its audience, though the request is quieter: it asks them to look at their own city again.

For the students who make and watch it, that request carries real weight. Many young Delhiites move through the city on autopilot, from home to school to screen, rarely stopping to ask who walked these streets before them. The play does not lecture them about heritage. It simply makes the city feel alive enough, and personal enough, that the next time they pass a crumbling gateway or an old shop, they might wonder about the story inside it.

It asks something of adults too. At a time when cities everywhere are rebuilt at speed and their histories are more often argued over than shared, the play offers a gentler idea of belonging. No one owns Delhi in this story. The poet, the trader, the refugee and the teenager all belong to it, and it belongs to all of them. Listening to one another's stories, the play suggests, is how a city stays whole.

Beyond Dilli

Dastaan-E Dilli is one chapter of a larger idea. The Dastaan-E Project, a signature IP of The Roots India, sets out to tell the stories of places the way the old tellers did: aloud, in company and from the ground up. Each chapter takes a different land as its subject and is shaped by its own history, music, languages and people. The next, Dastaan-E-UP, carries the tradition back to Lucknow, where the dastaan once reached its height, and on through Banaras, Prayagraj and Braj.

What connects the chapters is a belief about what theatre can do for a place. Monuments preserve the shape of the past; stories preserve its feeling. A city that stops telling its stories becomes a collection of buildings. A city that keeps telling them, and invites its young people to add their own, stays alive.

That is the work of the dastaan. It was never meant to be finished. Every telling adds a line.

Sit with the city a while longer. It has more stories to tell.