Sacred on Shuffle: How South Asian Americans Are Letting Bhajans Into the Everyday

Priya Nair does not consider herself particularly religious. She grew up in suburban New Jersey, attended temple on major holidays mostly because her parents asked her to, and spent most of her twenties actively distancing herself from anything that felt like obligation. But last year, somewhere between a particularly brutal work week and a meditation app that just wasn't cutting it, she found herself pulling up a Mirabai bhajan on Spotify.

"I wasn't looking for God," she says, laughing a little. "I was looking for something that felt like home."

She is not alone. Across the US, younger South Asian Americans are quietly folding devotional music — bhajans, kirtans, Sufi qawwalis, Vedic chants — into their daily listening in ways that have very little to do with formal worship and everything to do with something harder to name. Call it grounding. Call it cultural memory. Call it the thing that fills the gap when a mindfulness podcast just doesn't quite reach.

The Gap That Spotify Algorithms Can't Fill

The wellness industry has done a genuinely impressive job of packaging calm. There are apps for breathwork, playlists for focus, guided meditations narrated in voices specifically engineered to feel neutral and soothing. And for a lot of people, that stuff works.

But for many second- and third-generation South Asian Americans, something about those spaces has always felt slightly off — culturally placeless in a way that's hard to articulate. "White noise is white noise," says Arjun Mehta, a Chicago-based sound designer who started experimenting with devotional music in his own production work after years of feeling like Western ambient music was scratching the surface but not getting underneath it. "There's nothing wrong with it. It just doesn't carry anything for me."

What bhajans and kirtans carry, for listeners like Arjun, is texture. Centuries of it. The melodic structures of classical raags, the call-and-response dynamics of congregational singing, the specific emotional vocabulary of Sanskrit or Braj Bhasha or Urdu — these aren't just sounds. They're inherited architecture. And more and more people are discovering that you don't have to be devout to feel held by them.

Desacralizing Without Disrespecting

This is, admittedly, a complicated space to navigate. Devotional music exists within living religious traditions. Bhajans were composed as direct expressions of love for the divine. Kirtans are participatory rituals. Pulling them out of that context and dropping them into a morning routine playlist raises real questions about what gets lost in translation.

Musicians who work in this space tend to think about that tension a lot. Meera Pillai, a Houston-based vocalist who trained in Carnatic classical music and now records contemporary arrangements of traditional devotional pieces, describes her approach as "opening a door rather than moving the furniture."

"I'm not trying to strip the spirituality out," she explains. "I'm trying to make it accessible enough that someone who grew up hearing these songs at their grandmother's house but never really sat with them can actually sit with them now. The sacred is still there. I'm just lowering the entry point."

Her recordings — which layer traditional vocal lines over minimal, contemporary production — have found a surprisingly wide audience on streaming platforms, picked up by listeners who discovered them through yoga playlists or lo-fi study mixes and then went looking for more. "I get messages from people who say they cried the first time they really listened," she says. "Not because they're religious. Because they recognized something."

The Playlist as Personal Practice

For many listeners, the shift has been less about a single discovery and more about a gradual reorientation. Devotional music, it turns out, functions differently depending on context. The same kirtan that felt like background noise at a temple as a teenager can feel almost unbearably moving at 6 a.m. on a Tuesday, played quietly while the coffee brews.

Neha Krishnamurthy, a therapist based in the Bay Area who works primarily with South Asian clients, has started noticing this come up in sessions. "There's a lot of reclamation happening right now," she says. "People are revisiting things they rejected or ignored during their assimilation years — food, language, clothing — and music is a big part of that. Devotional music specifically carries a lot of emotional weight because it's so tied to family, to grandparents, to a sense of origin."

She's careful to note that for some clients, that weight is complicated. Religious trauma is real, and devotional music can be a trigger as much as a comfort. But for others, separating the music from the obligation — listening to a bhajan because you want to, not because you're supposed to — turns out to be quietly transformative.

New Formats, Old Feeling

The formats through which devotional music is now traveling are genuinely new. There are Spotify playlists with tens of thousands of followers curated specifically around "meditation bhajans" or "morning chants for calm." YouTube channels blend kirtan recordings with lo-fi aesthetics. Wellness creators on Instagram and TikTok are incorporating chants into breathwork videos, sound baths, and even workout content.

Arjun, the sound designer, recently released a short EP that pairs traditional Hanuman Chalisa verses with ambient electronic production. "I was nervous," he admits. "I thought people would think I was being disrespectful or gimmicky. Instead, I got messages from aunties in their sixties saying they'd been listening to it on their morning walks. That was not what I expected."

What it suggests is that the audience for this kind of work is broader and more varied than anyone might have predicted — cutting across generations, across levels of religious observance, across the usual demographic assumptions about who listens to what.

Why Now

There's probably something to be said about timing. The pandemic pushed a lot of South Asian Americans into closer contact with family, with inherited traditions, with questions about identity that the pace of pre-2020 life had made it easy to defer. The broader cultural moment — with its renewed interest in ancestry, in roots, in anything that feels genuinely rooted — created space for this kind of return.

But Priya, who started this whole thing by pulling up a Mirabai bhajan on a hard week, thinks it's simpler than that.

"I think we just got tired," she says. "Tired of performing assimilation, tired of pretending that Western wellness was enough, tired of feeling like our own traditions were either too religious or too ethnic to fit into our actual lives. At some point you just want something that was made for people like you, by people like you, that goes back further than you can even trace."

The bhajan was still playing in the background when she said that. She didn't turn it off.