About
Himanshu Bajpai is among the most prominent of the younger generation of dastangos - practitioners of dastangoi, the Urdu-Hindi art of oral storytelling. Born in 1987 in old Lucknow, he came to the form through Mahmood Farooqui's revival in 2013 and has since performed in over 800 shows across India and abroad.
A former journalist with doctoral research on the Naval Kishore Press, Bajpai's repertoire ranges from original dastans on poets and figures — Sahir Ludhianvi, Jaun Elia, the last Nawab of Awadh — to everyman tales. His book Qissa Qissa Lucknowa won the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar in 2021. His work is steeped in Awadhi culture and the syncretic tehzeeb of his city.
The artistry
Dastangoi is a spare form - a storyteller, a takht, and the voice. Bajpai works within that tradition but writes his own dastans, weaving Urdu poetry, Awadhi idiom, humour and pathos into long-form narration performed solo or as a two-hander. His subjects lean literary and local: the poets, the city, and the everyday qisse of Lucknow.
Bajpai belongs to the small cohort of younger practitioners who have kept dastangoi alive as a living art rather than a museum piece. What distinguishes him is an original repertoire — rather than only reciting inherited dastans, he authors new ones around the poets and figures he loves, from Sahir and Jaun Elia to the last Nawab of Awadh.
His work sits at the meeting point of Lucknow's literary past and its present audiences, carried in an Awadhi-inflected Urdu-Hindi that is increasingly rare on stage. For a host, the value is as much intellectual as performative: a programme built around Bajpai is a way into a culture, not merely an evening's entertainment. [Atlas Assessment]
One of the few practitioners keeping dastangoi alive for a new generation, and a bridge between Lucknow's literary past and its living audiences.