Modern Hindi is the working language of North Indian popular devotion. The aarti repertoire is its clearest showcase, above all Om Jai Jagdish Hare, composed in Hindi in the 1870s and now sung at the close of worship in temples and homes across India and the diaspora, so universal that most singers assume it is ancient. Around the aartis stands the bhajan culture, devotional songs in Hindi performed at satsangs, temple gatherings and festivals, a repertoire fed continuously by new composition and, in the twentieth century, transformed by mass media. The Hindi film industry made devotional song a national possession, with film bhajans passing directly into worship, and cassette, television and streaming culture each renewed the flow, while the televised Hindi serializations of the Ramayana and Mahabharata in the 1980s became religious events in their own right.
Print did the same work earlier. The Gita Press of Gorakhpur, founded in 1923, made inexpensive Hindi editions of scripture, prayer and commentary ubiquitous in North Indian homes, its Hindi Ramcharitmanas and Bhagavad Gita among the most printed books in any Indian language. Hindi thus functions as the vernacular liturgical language of much of Hindu North India, the language in which the tradition is actually sung, prayed and read by hundreds of millions.