Bhajan Jamming is the New Indian Nightlife

Three hundred people are packing into a Mumbai rooftop. There’s an LED wall, a smoke machine running, and a bar that isn’t serving alcohol. Instead of a drop, the crowd chants a bhajan their grandparents have known for decades — no altar, no one leading a prayer, just a full concert set up built around a devotional setlist.

That's bhajan jamming: devotional songs taken out of the temple or satsang setting and put into a live-music format — band, lighting, ticketed entry, and no alcohol. The audience isn’t there to watch someone perform a bhajan, they are there to sing it themselves.

Backstage Siblings, the Kolkata-based brother-sister duo Raghav and Prachi Agarwal, have become the name most associated with the format. What started as small gatherings has grown into more than 300 shows across 50-plus cities. Their sets refuse to stay in one lane. At one Mumbai session, a bhajan led into a Sufi number, followed by Christina Perri’s “A Thousand Years,” and the crowd sang through all three. Attendees have described the feeling afterward as "calm" and "energised" at once.

The shift lines up with two things happening at once. Young Indians are drinking less, and a generation raised on phone screens chasing rooms where everyone does the same thing at the same time. Bhajan jamming gives both a shape that feels culturally specific rather than imported.

The format has crossed borders too. Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch have hosted versions in community halls and nightclub venues over the past few months, with local organizers openly modelling their events on the Indian ones.

The devotional revival among young people has been publicly held up as proof that Hindu identity and modern life can coexist. However, critics push back, pointing to the ticketed entry, the corporate sponsors, the festival-style staging around religious material, and asking where spiritual expression ends and marketing begins.

Organizers aren't trying to keep this as a category of its own — the goal is festival lineups, bhajan jamming next to conventional acts. Between the Delhi crowds and the shows now popping up as far as New Zealand, that crossover is already underway.