Devotion, Diversified

Sadhna TV's schedule reads as a survey of Indian devotional television's standard repertoire: spiritual discourses, devotional music, mythological serials dramatizing Hindu epics, astrology segments and yoga and meditation instruction, threaded together with coverage of Indian cultural and social life the channel's own materials describe as central to its mission. What has done the most to build its audience in recent years is narrower than that broad mix, the live katha broadcasts of the preacher Aniruddhacharya Ji Maharaj, whose sessions have made Sadhna TV competitive with better-established devotional channels across northern India.

That popularity sits inside a media company built on diversification rather than devotion. Sadhna Broadcasting Ltd runs Sadhna TV next to the devotional channel Ishwar TV, but also next to Sadhna Plus News, VIP News, the movie channel Rishu Movies and the general channel Har Khabar, a spread of unrelated commercial properties under one BSE-listed holding company. The pattern is the same corporate-ownership shape this axis has already documented at Aastha TV and Sanskar TV, a devotional channel operating as one product line inside a broader commercial media business, except that here no religious teacher or institution sits anywhere in the ownership chain at all; Sadhna TV's devotional content and Rishu Movies' film library answer, in the end, to the same shareholders.