Noor Jehan

Allah Rakhi Wasai was born in Kasur in 1926 into a family of musicians and performers, trained under Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan among others, and was on stage as a child singer in Calcutta and Lahore by the mid-1930s under the name Baby Noor Jehan. She acted and sang in Punjabi films in Lahore, and Khandaan (1942), directed by Shaukat Hussain Rizvi, whom she married, made her a star.

She came to Bombay in 1943. Zeenat (1945) had the first all-female qawwali in film; Mehboob Khan's Anmol Ghadi (1946), with Naushad's Awaz De Kahan Hai, Jawan Hai Mohabbat and Aaja Meri Barbaad Mohabbat Ke Sahare, was the biggest musical of the decade; Jugnu (1947), opposite Dilip Kumar, followed. At Partition she and Rizvi moved to Lahore, and she never worked in India again, though she visited in 1982 as a guest of honour and was received by Lata and Dilip Kumar.

In Pakistan she acted until 1963 and then sang playback only, becoming the dominant voice of Urdu and Punjabi film for three decades — some thousands of songs — and the singer of the patriotic songs of the 1965 war. The title Malika-e-Tarannum, queen of melody, was given to her there. She died in Karachi in December 2000, at seventy-four.

Noor Jehan's voice was full, rounded and powerful, with a trained classical base and a dramatic, almost operatic delivery that belonged to the singing-star era, when the actress sang her own songs on screen. In the Bombay years she sang with a heavy sweetness that later Pakistani recordings sharpened into a brilliant, cutting top. The Anmol Ghadi songs show the voice at its most lyrical.