Culture of Uttar Pradesh

Thousands gather at Allahabad (Prayagraj) to take part in the annual Magh Mela festival on the banks of the Ganges which is organised on a larger scale every 12th year, when it is called the Kumbha Mela, where over 10 million Hindu pilgrims congregate –The largest peaceful gathering of human beings in the world.

Badaun is a religiously significant city whose historical monuments and tombs attract thousand of tourists annually.

Gautama Buddha gave his first sermon at Sarnath and died at Kushinagar; both are important pilgrimage sites for Buddhists.

[further explanation needed] Ghazipur, 80 km from Varanasi, has Ganges Ghats and the Tomb of British potentate Lord Cornwallis, maintained by the Archaeologic survey of India.

Music personalities including Naushad Ali, Talat Mehmood, Begum Akhtar, Anup Jalota, Shubha Mudgal, Bismillah Khan, Ravi Shankar, Kishan Maharaj, Vikash Maharaj, Hari Prasad Chaurasia, Gopal Shankar Misra, Siddheshwari Devi, Girija Devi and Sir Cliff Richard were originally from Uttar Pradesh.

The region's folk heritage includes songs called rasiya (especially popular in Braj), which celebrate the mythological love of Radha and Krishna.

Urdu is prominent in Uttar Pradesh as Lucknow was once the centre of Indo-Persianate culture in north India.

The pilgrimage circuit includes the most religiously prestigious of the cities considered holy in Hinduism on the banks of the Ganges and Yamuna, rivers which are also considered sacred: Varanasi, Ayodhya ( the birthplace of Rama), Mathura ( the birthplace of Krishna), Vrindavan (where Lord Krishna spent his childhood), and Allahabad (Prayagraj) (the confluence or 'holy-sangam' of the Ganges-Yamuna rivers).

Dayal Bagh in Agra is a modern-day temple and tourist site with lifelike marble sculptures.

Uttar Pradesh's centres of art and craft include: Many festivals are religious in origin, although several of them are celebrated irrespective of caste and creed.