“Click, Chant, Worship: Authenticity, Commodification and Appification of Hindu Devotion”

This paper examines how devotional apps curate Hindu religious experience and reshape everyday religiosity amid the expansion of digital infrastructure. Using qualitative analysis of app content using the walkthrough method, interactions with app co-founders and app users, as well as field-based observations of pilgrimage in Gaya, Bihar, India, including the state-recognised Pitripaksha Mela alongside accounts from priests and pilgrims, the research explores how market-oriented platforms complement portions of domestic and pilgrimage ritual work into on-demand services (guided pujas, mantra chanting, darshan, chadhava, and outsourced rituals executed by local priests).This research finds that the key ethical and analytical problem of the digital devotion is not access but governance of authenticity. Popularity, ratings, and download matrices can oversimplify the complex, sensory, communal processes of meaning-making. This highlights the need to examine bias, power dynamics and the “onlife” liminality through which digital sacred forms circulate and become accepted as the norm.