On a Saturday evening, a bhajan clubbing event was organised by the Rekha Gupta government at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi.

A video of “Gen-Z” students dancing to “Radhe radhe japo, chale aayenge Bihari” was shared by the BJP government’s culture minister Kapil Mishra. He called it an “unparalleled confluence of modernity and spirituality,” that would “strengthen our heritage”. The event was also streamed on Satsang TV’s YouTube channel for two hours.

During my school years, my father took me to the institute, hoping it would inspire my engineering ambitions. While I never chose that path, its reverence still holds an impact.

Out of curiosity, I watched the video. Now you don’t have to.

The disharmony of bhajan clubs

Around a hundred students who have sacrificed thousands of hours to get into the institute can be seen sitting, bored – some underdressed, some scrolling on their phones; new to the expectations of stage performers.

Two lead singers of the “Keshavam band” – a man and a woman - try to get the students to raise their arms and cheer “Banke Bihari ki…jai!” The crowd remains hesitant. It could be the camera roaming in the crowd that is making them conscious. Or that two-thirds of the amphitheatre was empty.

About a dozen professors sat on sofas near the stage – cross-armed, seemingly marking their own attendance.

With the traditional bansuri, the modern drums, an electric guitar, and a synthesiser roll in. Two bhajans down, the singers plead with the crowd to sing along. More students can then be seen clapping to “Kaun kehte hain bhagwan khate nahi?” (Who says God doesn’t eat?)

About 30 minutes in, the lead singer complains, “Yaar, I had heard IITians make a lot of noise, sing songs and bhajans, but I can’t feel it. Come on, sing with me. Does everyone know this bhajan?”

He later goes on to teach a step and tells them it’s the day’s “assignment”. Most students start engaging with the new step. Some near the stage have gotten up to dance. More follow. Some remain stubbornly seated.

As he tells students about the time when Krishna disguised himself as a bangle-seller (manihari), the singer asks them to jump.

Many in the crowd can be seen genuinely enjoying – figuring out new steps, smiling, dancing, sometimes drifting into the kind of gestures you’d see at a Bollywood party – before quickly recalibrating. This was still a bhajan.

At one point, during an adaptation of Sukhbir’s “Ishq Tera Tadpave”, the singer had to remind the crowd not to sing “Oh ho ho ho”, but to replace it with “Radhe Radhe, woh humko Shyam se mila de”.

Who benefits from devotional students?

At its best, a bhajan clubbing event is a mass workout, like most concerts.

At its worst, it reveals something more deliberate.

This wasn’t just a college fest experiment. It was a state-backed event, amplified by political endorsement and explicitly framed as a way to “strengthen culture”.

Now, clubbing in itself is not something any of our governments will promote, for it is associated with drinking, dancing, and engagement of the taboo kind. It is nightlife, meant to stay in the shadows of freedom. Bhajans, on the other hand, are innocent, purely devotional, meant to cater to your religious beliefs. 

By bringing these two strangers together, like avocado on jalebi, the government seems to be doing three things:

1. It assumes that religiosity and modernity exist in separate worlds – that the devout cannot party, and the modern cannot pray.

2. It chooses which traditions to foreground. And in doing so, it normalises a singular cultural identity through language they consider “modern”.

3. Far from something lived and chosen, culture becomes something curated, performed and promoted.

There is nothing wrong with bhajans. Nor with young people engaging with them. But when the state engineers that engagement, it ceases to be organic and sits uneasily in institutions meant to be secular, diverse, and scientifically tempered.

The dissonance becomes harder to ignore when set against the pressures these campuses are known for.

The event was organised barely 10 days after a first-year BTech student reportedly died by suicide. The 19-year-old had depression, as per the Delhi Police’s preliminary investigations. But his death was not an isolated incident; in the past 5 years alone, there have been at least 65 suicides at IITs – evidence of the high-pressure academic environment. Even the Supreme Court remarked last year that something is “seriously wrong” with the system.

Despite this, the crowd did not reject the format; it adapted to it.

The same was observed at Delhi University, where the state government organised bhajan clubbing in 8 colleges from February 10 to 19, during which the university imposed a blanket ban on any forms of protest after a pro-UGC Equity protest led to chaos.

With such “confluences” being popularised, it’s worth asking: what does the state wish to promote on our campuses? Less dissent, more devotion.

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