Mumbai
Outside the plane hangar-sized venue, the group of Gen Z workplace staff and youngsters is thickening. Event workers scan QR codes and fasten wristbands. Friends take selfies collectively as they wait in a queue. As night time falls, the doorways open and the almost 5,000 attendees stroll in.
Inside the venue in India’s business hub Mumbai they take away their sneakers and sit cross-legged on the ground. The lights dim. In the entrance row, a younger mom rocks her child on her shoulders, ready for the music to start.
When it comes, it’s not thumping electro or pop lyrics that increase by means of the audio system, however centuries-old Hindu devotional songs more generally heard in a temple or spiritual procession.
As the music builds, total sections of the group rise to their ft, clapping, chanting and dancing collectively. The ambiance is ecstatic. But there’s not a whiff of marijuana, nor is anybody boozing. In reality, the organizers have expressly banned alcohol and medicine from the occasion – and the attendees wouldn’t have it another method.
Welcome to “Bhajan clubbing,” a fast-growing pattern that’s seeing younger Indians collect to lose themselves – soberly – in one other iteration of the “sober curious” occasions or “coffee raves” which are rising in reputation in Europe and America, as Gen Z the world over more and more flip their backs on medicine and alcohol.
After two healthful hours of singing and chanting, the crowds file out in completely satisfied teams.
It was the primary “Bhajan clubbing” live performance Jill Veera, 25, had been too. She says she’d go once more.
“A concert that can actually bring you towards God, it was tremendous, amazing,” she advised NCS.
“At most concerts, smoking, vaping, alcohol is natural,” she stated afterwards. “But coming here and sipping buttermilk, that was my alcohol.”
The hymns themselves are usually not new. Bhajans are a centuries-old type of devotional singing carried out in temples, spiritual processions and group areas throughout India, usually freed from cost.
What is new is the setting: ticketed occasions held in massive venues, full with smoke machines, large LED screens and the sort of manufacturing often related to clubbing and concert events.
“The theatrics speak to us,” stated 26-year-old Dhwani Paradia, who attended a current gathering together with her youthful sister. “The smoke, the fire effects, the beat of the music, those are things our generation relates to.”
Her sister, 23-year-old Fiyoni Paradia, stated the staging felt acquainted to audiences raised on digital music festivals and live performance tradition. “Even the backdrops felt similar to techno concerts,” she stated. “So even that attracts Gen Z crowds.”
At the middle of the motion is Backstage Siblings, a performer duo who’ve been singing bhajans since they have been youngsters, and who’ve constructed a following throughout India’s main cities coding these century-old bhajans in Gen Z’s language.
India’s Gen Z are into a brand new sort of clubbing and it is more prayer than party
Raghav Agarwal, one half of the duo, tells NCS that they’ve a message: “Alcohol and clubbing are two different things. Alcohol is being intoxicated, clubbing is enjoying yourself.”
Clubbers “can come here with their grandparents, with their friends, with their parents, their dates,” provides his sister and fellow performer Prachi Agarwal.
The pattern has grown massive sufficient to draw backing from Saregama, considered one of India’s oldest music labels. And on-line, the format travels effectively. Videos from these gatherings exhibiting chanting crowds beneath live performance lights, viewers members crying, hugging strangers and dancing barefoot have racked up tens of millions of views on-line.
Supporters argue that the gatherings characterize a type of devotion untethered from inflexible rituals and the gatekeeping usually related to temples or spiritual processions.
Some critics on social media counter that the gatherings danger turning spirituality into spectacle, efficiency and commodity suddenly.
India’s spiritual and non secular economic system was estimated at roughly $58 billion in 2025, and is projected to develop steadily over the following decade.
The “Bhajan clubbing” motion has additionally unfolded towards the backdrop of a broader political shift in India, the place Hindu symbolism and spiritual identification have turn out to be more and more seen in public life – on the expense, critics say, of the secular beliefs laid down by its trendy founders.
Leaders from India’s ruling Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, together with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, have publicly praised bhajan clubbing gatherings. In an deal with expressing his approval of the pattern, Modi stated it was “heartening” how Gen Z had adopted bhajans into their life-style with out compromising the “dignity and purity” of the songs.
Nikunj Gupta, who organizes these occasions by means of his firm Sanatana Journey, says the viewers is overwhelmingly younger: school college students, current graduates and early-career professionals looking for connection in quickly altering city environments.
“People have so much anxiety and stress,” Gupta stated. “People feel relief when they come to such places.”
With a mean age of 29, India has one of many world’s youngest populations. Its younger persons are more and more educated and bold however many are pissed off over fierce competitors for restricted jobs. Recent allegations of irregularities in authorities recruitment exams have solely deepened frustrations among some younger Indians.
For a number of hours, bhajan gatherings provide an escape from these pressures. As hundreds sing, clap and chant collectively, attendees describe a sense of bliss and belonging, an opportunity to step exterior the pressures of labor, research and an more and more aggressive society.
Similar gatherings are actually showing throughout Mumbai, Delhi and Bengaluru, whereas variations of the format have begun surfacing abroad in international locations together with Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom.
“Instead of feeling stressed or getting a hangover, they are feeling a sense of calm,” says Gupta of Sanatana Journey. “And I think that is why so many more young people are becoming a part of something like this.”
In the completely satisfied afterglow of the “Backstage Siblings” live performance in Mumbai, Fiyoni Paradia stated she’d encourage others to return and see a live performance.
“I think spirituality comes to everyone in their own different way so this is something you can try out to see whether this is what feels like your fit to get in touch with that side.”
Her cousin Heta Solanki is more emphatic:
“Start going once, you will get attached to it… it’s very fun.”