Bhajan raves, caste jokes, Kundli-matching—young India is scrolling back to conservatism

These were the battles we thought we’d already fought. The slow recognition that caste is a plague upon Indian society. The hard-won right to choose your own partner.

A 'bhajan rave' organised by the Backstage Siblings | Image for representation | YouTube screengrab

Two recent viral videos bookend an understanding of India’s Gen Z. In the first, thousands of affluent young people gather in a darkened auditorium, chanting, clapping, swaying to upbeat devotional music. This trend, led by the duo Backstage Siblings, we are told, is sweeping India’s metro cities, filling up halls in Mumbai, Kolkata, Delhi, and elsewhere. Rose petals are showered over a blissed-out audience. Thousands of likes and affirmatory comments flood in.

In the second video, a lighthearted skit, a young woman films herself serving noodles in hurriedly fashioned disposable utensils to unexpected guests. The caption: ‘Jab lower-caste dost ghar aa jayein’, or ‘When lower-caste friends visit you’. The original creator clarified that her video was a harmless one about escaping the chore of washing dishes. But the responses on the manipulated version are full of laughing emojis and the same affirmatory comments.

Both these videos exist on the same continuum. They are evidence of the same thing. Indian Gen Z, privileged and not, skews conservative. Unlike millennials and Gen X before them, who were characterised by rebelliousness and a certain strain of contrarian thought, a generation of younger adults has come full circle. They are conservative in their cultural choices, their social attitudes, their political leanings, and increasingly, in the hierarchies they are happily defending.

 

‘Granny hobbies’ and Gopi lehengas

We’re finding that a generation put under the microscope since birth by marketing consultancy firms, is not drinking or using drugs, has no community, is having less sex than generations preceding it, and is deeply invested in what trend pieces politely call “granny hobbies”.

Some of this is rather sweet and wholesome. Some, not so much. I’ve witnessed the astronomical rise of “trad-wife” content on YouTube and Instagram, first elsewhere, and now in India with utter horror. Indian Gen Zs are consulting astrologers before job interviews and first dates, and romanticising endogamous arranged marriages. Kundali-matching and tarot-reading, long believed to be the preserve of Sainik Farms aunties, is witnessing a resurgence on college campuses. Astro-tech is a booming business. The app Astrotalk, with 8 crore users, is due to launch physical stores. The Economic Times opines that “to Gen Z, astrology is low-pressure self-help — a soft guide toward understanding one’s emotions.” In a country where therapy is still stigmatised, a 99-rupee astro chat is often all that is on offer.

Spiritual luxury travel, which ought to sound paradoxical, is on the rise among younger travellers. The Mathura-Vrindavan circuit now functions as “a launchpad for religious influencers”. It pulled in over 6 crore domestic tourists in 2022, surpassing Goa. The young are flocking for paragliding, boating, and fountain shows — and also for the views. As a report in ThePrint points out: “At Banke Bihari Temple, young women in Gopi lehengas twirl for the camera. On the ghats, swings have been set up for visitors to lounge, pose, and frame their Vrindavan vlogs. Costume rentals outside the temples do brisk business in Radha skirts, yellow dhotis, peacock mukuts, and bansuris. Selfie points now line the roads.”

Every trend piece about this moment is so… gushy. The coverage is breathless and obstinately uncritical. Hawk-eyed magazines hungry to chase the next new thing have labelled it a “devotional renaissance”, an attempt by Gen Z to “find meaning” in a noisy world. Cosmopolitan wonders how many times you can dance to a David Guetta number before feeling empty. A columnist at the Indian Express writes that behind their memes and cool image, this generation is “crafting a fresh grammar of spirituality that is fluid, inclusive, playlist-driven, and unapologetically open.”

Are they though? If a bhajan rave occurs in the wild and doesn’t make it to the ’gram, did it even happen? I keep circling back to a simpler question: Is Gen Z conservative, or are they consumers of conservatism? Is the return to tradition ideology or just another content vertical?

What’s behind it all?

Consider the Backstage Siblings, who quit their investment banking jobs to organise bhajan raves and charge upwards of Rs 800 per ticket for what you can find at your local mandir for free. Bengaluru even had a ‘grocery rave’, which is basically an excursion to the mandi with a Rs 2,500 price tag. Even the trad wives have monetised their peacocking of having no ambitions.

Ria Chopra, author of Never Logged Out: How the Internet Created India’s Gen Z, points to a significant rupture in how this generation experiences the world.

“With liberalisation and globalisation, there was optimism about India’s place in the world,” she tells me in an interview. That optimism seems to have evaporated. “Now that we have reached our early to mid 20s, we’re hurtling toward environmental crises, economies are collapsing, multiple wars are happening all the time, and AI will take away our jobs.”

The COVID pandemic, Chopra adds, made us lose faith in larger institutions. “Governments scrambled and healthcare systems crumbled. All of this anxiety is being blamed on the liberal governments of the 2010s, with the idea that this didn’t work.”

The rise of neo-conservatism after periods of crises is entirely expected. In India too, the political dimension is harder to parse but impossible to ignore. A 2024 Lokniti Youth and Politics Survey of 1,200 first-time voters found that 11 per cent cited “Protected my religion/religious interests” as the Modi government’s top achievement — the third-highest response after “Development.” More than half of these respondents were women. (However, 17.4 per cent also agreed that “Communalism had increased” when asked about their primary complaint against the government.)

This isn’t unique to India. Across the world, Gen Z has broken from the script that assumed each generation would be more progressive than the last. In the USA, young men have shifted right, even as young women decisively have not. In Europe, far-right parties are gaining ground with voters under 30. The assumption that digital natives would automatically embrace liberal values has come undone.

“But these promises [made by strongmen] should seem hollow to even a slightly critical thinking adult,” Chopra says, referring to women Trump voters, for instance. “To know that your position in the eyes of these people is not great, that they do not respect you, but you will still vote for them — that has to come from a place of extreme crisis and psychological instability.”

 

A generation in retrograde

To Gen X-ers and millennials like me, this moment can feel bewildering, like the conversation has looped back on itself. These were the battles we thought we’d already fought. The idea that women’s ambitions extend beyond the kitchen. The slow recognition that caste is a plague upon Indian society, not a culture to be celebrated. The hard-won right to choose your own partner. The arc had always felt uneven, but broadly progressive. Now, a generation with more access to information than any before it is scrolling past all of this and landing right back at the beginning.

What Chopra finds most striking is how unapologetic this generation is about airing views that, at least in privileged sections, would once have given an audience pause.

“You’d expect someone to be ashamed to say that they don’t believe in gender equality,” she says. “But it’s become so acceptable to say, ‘Actually, there is biological determinism and women are inferior to men.’ I see a lot of younger people being very open about the fact that they don’t support reservations.” Caste, indeed, is now grounds for comedy.

This is the part that unsettles me most. Not just that these views exist, because they always have, across the class spectrum. But that they’re being aired without examination, treated as reasonable positions in public discourse rather than ideas that should be challenged.

Even the language has gotten darker—the “body count” conversation has become normalised among teenagers. “These 14-, 15-year-olds are saying things like, ‘Women only go to alpha males. Unless you’re a Chad, you’re not supported by the system.’ You’re 15 and worried about marrying a woman who is not a virgin.” These are children, absorbing a worldview that thinks of women as commodities declining in value — and learning this before they are old enough to vote.

The algorithms accelerate this. Chopra says the more young men watch Andrew Tate, Joe Rogan, or Indian right-wing podcast bros popping out of the woodwork, the more likely they are to be fed content that radicalises the very young. Some of this is pure rage-bait.

“There are a lot of bad faith actors doing this just for views,” Chopra says. “Look at some of these Indian commentators and the way they talk about alimony or custody rights. Every time a woman gets sexually assaulted, they will try to derail the conversation by saying, ‘Men get raped too.’ But there’s a very impressionable audience actually absorbing all these views unironically.” The worst part is that all of the rage works in favour of the creators.

None of this translates into conservatism in the traditional sense — being frugal with spending, for instance. Chopra points out that credit card debt among young people is at an all-time high, with horrifying prognostications that Indian Gen Z will “die poor”. This isn’t so much a return to roots than a rootless generation reaching for whatever straw of stability it can find, because the systems and communities that were supposed to catch them have collapsed. At least Mercury in retrograde gives them someone to blame.

Karanjeet Kaur is a journalist, former editor of Arré, and a partner at TWO Design. She tweets @Kaju_Katri. Views are personal.

(Edited by Asavari Singh)