Acoustic Shrines, Chaotic Cafes, and the Urban Kurukshetra: A Study of Spiritual Podcasts and Urban Mobility in India.

In recent years, the global podcast industry has witnessed rapid growth and diversification, with distinct trends emerging across different regions. India, now the third-largest podcast market in the world after the USA and China, presents a unique landscape shaped by spiritual and devotional content. While crime, comedy, technology, and politics are the most popular podcast themes in the USA and China, devotional podcasts are the most popular in India. In 2023, Shrimad Bhagavad Gita was the most-streamed podcast on Spotify in India. This paper will examine the burgeoning rise of spiritual podcasts in India to understand how young Indian citizens deploy spiritual wisdom in their daily lives through podcasts. In explicating the newly emergent urban dimensions of religio-political sensibilities that are sustained through audio consumption, I argue that Kurukshetra – a place depicted as a battleground in the ancient text of the Indian epic Mahabharata, no longer remains a literary battlefield of the mythical past. Instead, Kurukshetra streams into the daily experiences of urban Indian youth.