Two young South Asian women decided to follow their passions without listening to anybody who tried to stop them, and embarked on a journey of self-expression. The product of this endeavour was Lil India. 

5X Press spoke to Jasmine Sull, one half of Lil India, (with the other half being her cousin Loveleen), about how the duo got into DJing, their experiences, and their upcoming performance at the 5X Blockparty this September.

The duo has been DJing for over 10 years now and their music is a fusion of mostly Bhangra and Rap. 

They are ardent advocates of having more female DJs, as DJing has mostly been a male dominated scene, and it’s really hard for women to break through. 

“We just want to put them at the forefront,” said Jasmine in an earlier interview. 

And that is exactly what the duo has been doing.

“We started when we were pretty young and we just didn’t hear what we wanted to hear when we would go out, so we would just repeatedly ask people and be like, ‘you guys should play this,’ until eventually they were like, ‘ok how about we teach you guys how to DJ and then you guys can do your own thing?’” Sull said in an interview with 5X Press.

“So that’s how it really started. We just wanted to hear R&B everywhere we went.”

The pair, who were always inseparable, had the same taste in music and realized that it made sense for them to DJ together.

Despite not growing up playing any instruments, Jasmine said she loved listening to music and dancing to it, as well as finding new music online, which really helped foster her passion for it. 

“We grew up listening to a lot of music. It was always around us,” she said. 

Growing up, Hindi music was all around, but the duo really started vibing with it much later, after a lot of research. 

“I fell in love with it the more I researched it and now it’s a huge part of what we play,” she said.

The pair then began to play at different venues and shows in Vancouver and even threw their own hip-hop parties, in addition to putting out a few mixtapes and “throwing JALOOS, a night dedicated to Bhangra and Bollywood,” that then turned into a radio show on No Fun Radio.

Sull says she is excited and eager to play at the 5X Fest Blockparty in September.

“You don’t get a music festival that [is] so diverse and it's cool that they are doing it at a venue in Vancouver that would normally get to host all of these great acts, with all sorts of big and small artists playing all sorts of music. It's really great,” she said.

We are really looking forward to seeing Lil India playing on September 18 at the 5X Fest Blockparty and we hope you are too! 

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About the author: Roshni is a self-proclaimed Comedy Queen who specializes in laughing at her own jokes. Her hobbies include making people smile, watching movies and analysing them, reading books, practicing yoga (occasionally), hogging on well-cooked biryani and scrolling through dog videos and memes on Instagram. Her love for writing stems from her love for art in general, which is fuelled by her background in theatre. Catch on her instagram at @roshni_rakshit daily, where she regularly shares her experience with movies and occasionally offends people with her political sense of humour.