The sold-out stadium show is the first time a Punjabi musician has headlined one of Canada’s biggest venues.
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Pop star Diljit Dosanjh kicked off the Canadian leg of his Dil-luminati performance tour in Vancouver on Saturday night, the largest Punjabi music concert held outside India.
Two hours before the concert, hundreds of people lined up outside the entrances to BC Place. Many were generations of family members huddled under umbrellas to protect themselves from the rain.
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Fans from across North America, including Sukhi Kaur, 34, from California, traveled to Vancouver to see the musician perform. Kaur came with his sister Kiren Chand, who came from Seattle.
“For us, being here is about the representation of North India; There isn’t much in Canada and the United States. “It is huge that one of our own has reached this scale.”
Chand said that Dosanjh not only represents the Punjabi minorities and their descendants, who are spread across the world, but the musician also represents the religious beliefs of the diaspora.
“His wearing a turban signifies this, our Sikh beliefs,” Chand said. “He is the first of us to build such a global platform.”
The sold-out show at the stadium, which has a capacity of about 54,000 seats, is also the first time a Punjabi musician has headlined one of Canada’s largest venues, according to the tour website.
To prepare for the three-hour show, a hotel near the venue informed its guests of the length of the show and offered them earplugs.
“We have provided earplugs in case music enters the room,” reads a notice from the director of room operations at the JW Marriott Parq hotel. The memo was photographed and posted on Twitter by Rajan Mangat of Surrey, who is attending the concert.
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The 30-year-old and his siblings will be bringing their parents, both originally from Punjab, to Dosanjh’s concert.
“We bought them tickets for their birthday,” Mangat said. “It will be his first concert like this, inside a stadium like this.”
For the second-generation Canadian, Mangat said Dosanjh’s rise to fame in the country shows the growing presence of people in Canada with Punjabi roots.
“The community is excited because we’ve heard about a lot of other people doing this around the world, but this is one of our barriers that we break down in our city,” he said Saturday.
“It’s showing the younger and older generations that we’re here.”
The musician, who previously starred in several Bollywood films including Udta Punjab and Dunki, He has also proven to be a pioneer in the North American music scene.
In 2023, he was the first artist of Sikh-Punjab origin to headline a stage at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. The previous year, the musician’s Born to Shine tour launched in Vancouver to a sold-out crowd at Rogers Arena.
“I went to that show, one of the best concerts I’ve ever been to,” Mangat recalled.
“It was a great cultural celebration with people between six and 65 years old dancing; I could not believe it. “I’m really excited to experience that again.”
On Saturday afternoon, resale tickets for fans who wanted to sit near the artist in the front row sold from $482.79 to $713.89 on Ticketmaster. Other seats were listed at a premium price of more than several thousand dollars.
“Let us witness history in the making,” reads a Thursday social media post by Dosanjh. It included footage of him touching the ground at BC Place before raising his hands in prayer.
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One of the hits Dosanjh is expected to perform on Saturday is Lover from his hit album MoonChild Era, which was produced locally by Surrey’s Aneil Singh Kainth, who records under the name Intense.
Kainth previously said that the growing success of Punjabi music in Canada is partly due to the influx of university students from India coming to live here.
“When I was a kid I listened to AC/DC and Def Leppard, as well as Indian music,” said the producer. “I thought it would be cool to combine and merge genres. Now, we are face to face with Western music in terms of global streaming figures.”
– With files from Stuart Derdeyn
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