Two Voices, One Bhakti: The Journey of Aks & Lakshmi

We still remember the moment we knew this wasn’t a side project anymore. 

We were performing at the Hindu Mandir Executives’ Conference in Indianapolis — a room full of temple leaders and the next generation of Hindu American organizers. Partway through a stotra, we watched a woman in the second row close her eyes and press her hand to her heart. She wasn’t part of any choreography. She was just there, fully, with the poem. 

That’s the whole point of what we do: taking devotional poetry that is centuries old and giving it a sound that lets a modern, multi-faith room feel it in real time. 

We didn’t set out to build a music career, let alone a joint one. We met in New York, both of us working on Yuva Rhythms, a youth album project through Chinmaya Mission’s CHYK community — Aks composing and producing, Lakshmi singing. We spent many months in the studio, arranging Sanskrit stotras into something young adults would actually want to listen to. 

Somewhere in those sessions, it stopped being about one album. We realized we wanted to spend our lives doing this. So we did — as musical partners first, and life partners right alongside it.

Getting to that studio took two very different roads. 

Aks grew up in a family of Indian classical musicians in Maryland. His grandmother taught him vocal music. His grandfather chanted stotras every single day, and that’s where the Sanskrit came from. He studied software engineering in college and was working as an engineer when a phone call changed the trajectory of his career. He was accepted into KM Music Conservatory, A.R. Rahman’s own school, and graduated at the top of his class — which is what opened the door to working directly with Rahman: first in his studio on Bollywood films, then touring with him live. 

Lakshmi’s path started in Singapore. She was attending Hinduism classes at the Hindu Centre from the age of three, and by five she had started Carnatic vocal and Bharatanatyam training at the Singapore Indian Fine Arts Society. But her deepest musical training came from closer to home — her own mother, Padmini Chandrashekar, with whom she’s recorded several devotional albums over the years. Later, Lakshmi built a career in finance in Manhattan. She left it to pursue a Master’s in Religious Studies at  Stanford, with no clear career on the other side of that decision. 

Neither of those leaps — Aks’s out of engineering, Lakshmi’s out of finance — felt safe at the time. We’ve learned that the leap only feels reckless right before you take it. 

That combination — Aks’s production and classical training, Lakshmi’s scholarship and voice — is what became Electronic Bhakti Music. We take the words of poet-saints like Adi Shankaracharya, Kabir, Mirabai, and Surdas and set them against cinematic electronic production, weaving in storytelling and visuals so a 75-minute show educates as much as it moves people. In 2013, we released The Bhakti Movement, distributed globally by Sony 

Music. We’ve since built out eight albums, always chasing the same question: how do you make five-thousand-year-old devotion feel urgent to today’s global audiences? 

That question has taken us further than we expected. We’ve been guest presenters at Princeton, Stanford, and the Parliament of World Religions. We’ve been cultural ambassadors at the American and Indian Embassies. We’ve done fundraiser concerts for Chinmaya Mission, Vedanta Society, Sivananda centers, Brahmakumaris, and Aurobindo Society. Lakshmi’s writing on the Bhakti poet-saints regularly appears in Hinduism Today.

None of that changes what actually happens on stage, though. It’s still just two people getting a room to feel what we felt in that studio in New York.

That’s still the work today — from our full-length “Krishna: Many Names, One God” concert to more interactive Bhajan Jamming sessions. This fall, we’ll be bringing it to communities across North America. If any of this resonates, we’d love to talk.

You can reach us at bookings@akslakshmi.com or find our music and past performances on YouTube at @AksLakshmi, where a global community of over 230,000 has joined us in this journey.

Aks & Lakshmi are a Los Angeles-based composer-vocalist duo who pioneered Electronic Bhakti Music. Their work has been distributed by Sony Music, and featured at Princeton, Stanford, and the Parliament of World Religions. They have been recognized as cultural innovators, and audiences describe their music as healing and transformative.