‘One of our own breaking barriers’: Diljit Dosanjh sells out BC Place

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Pop star Diljit Dosanjh kicked off the Canadian leg of his Dil-luminati tour of performances in Vancouver Saturday night — the largest Punjabi music concert held outside of India.

Two hours before the concert, hundreds of people formed lines outside the entrances of B.C. Place. Many were generations of family members who huddled together under umbrellas, keeping dry from the rain.

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Fans from all over North America, including California’s Sukhi Kaur, 34, travelled to Vancouver to see the musician perform. Kaur came with her sister Kiren Chand, who drove in from Seattle.

“Being here, for us, it’s about North Indian representation — there’s not a lot of it in Canada and America. It’s massive that one of our people has made it to this scale.”

Chand said that not only does Dosanjh represent Punjabis and their descendants, who are spread across the globe, but the musician also signifies the diaspora’s religious beliefs.

“His wearing of 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 around 54,000 seats, is also the first time a Punjabi musician has headlined at one of Canada’s largest venues, according to the tour website.

In preparation for the three-hour performance, a hotel next to the venue informed its guests about the duration of the show and offered them earplugs.

“We have provided earplugs in case the music does travel into the room,” reads a notice from the JW Marriott Parq Hotel’s director of room operations. The memo was photographed and posted to Twitter by Surrey’s Rajan Mangat, who is attending the concert.

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The 30-year-old and his siblings are taking their parents, both of whom are originally from Punjab, to Dosanjh’s concert.

“We bought them tickets for their birthday,” said Mangat. “It will be their first concert ever like this — inside an arena 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 have heard of so many others doing this stuff around the world, but this is one of our own breaking barriers in our city,” he said Saturday.

“He’s showing younger and older generations that we are here.”

The musician, who has previously starred in several Bollywood films, including Udta Punjab and Dunki, has also proven to be a pioneer in North America’s 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 big cultural celebration with people from age six to 65 dancing — I couldn’t believe it. I’m so excited to experience that again.”

Saturday afternoon, resale tickets for fans who wanted to be seated close to the artist in the first row were sold from $482.79 to as high as $713.89 on Ticketmaster. Other seats were listed at a markup price of more than several thousand dollars.

“Witness history in the making,” read a Thursday post on social media from Dosanjh. It included footage of him touching the ground of B.C. 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 smash album MoonChild Era, which was produced locally by Surrey’s Aneil Singh Kainth, who records under the name Intense.

Kainth previously said that the skyrocketing success of Punjabi music in Canada is partly due to an influx of university students from India coming to live here.

“Growing up, I was listening to AC/DC and Def Leppard as well as music from India,” the producer said. “I thought it would be dope to combine and fuse genres. Now, we are toe-to-toe with Western music in terms of global streaming numbers.”

– With files from Stuart Derdeyn

sgrochowski@postmedia.com

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