From the global rise of our favourite half-Gujarati party girl Charli xcx to DJ sets popping up in clubs, coffee shops, and even rickshaws across the country, there’s no denying that electronic dance music has sunk its teeth into our collective consciousness. The genre’s popularity has been growing within India for two decades now, and now, finally, it is being treated with the legitimacy it deserves. Whether you want to kick back and to a deep house set on YouTube or hit the club and dance the night away, there’s a DJ out there ready to give you what you need.
Unfortunately, while interest in dance DJing has soared, women have been and continue to be overlooked in this industry. For instance, DJ Mag, one of the world’s most prominent electronic music platforms, drops a list of the world’s “Top 100 DJs” annually, and every year, women are suspiciously absent from their ranks. In 2024, only 14 were featured on the list, and even this abysmally low figure was a significant improvement compared to the singular female act that made the list a decade prior.
People like to brush these numbers off by insisting that DJing isn’t a woman’s hobby. Likely, they’re convinced that a woman doesn’t have the skillset to adequately handle DJ equipment or the charisma to energise a crowd. When influencers and models of all genders take up DJing as a hobby, vitriol is specifically aimed towards women if their performance is below par. Obviously, we know this is just misogynistic nonsense. As with virtually every other case where women are undermined (which is basically always), we manage to break through and prove our worth.
Here are some of our favourite homegrown woman DJs, showing everyone that women really can do it all:
