From an early age she was coached by Ustad Chaand Khan, a maestro of the Delhi gharana (style or school). It was in Pakistan that Bano was punished, greatly feted and honoured - she got the Pride of Performance award in 1974 - but she was born in Delhi and spent her childhood in Rohtak, not far from India's capital city. It was rumoured that the president's generals attended these music functions dressed in civvies. In spite of official opposition she continued to perform for select audiences in country houses to which the secret police had no access. Tapes of her songs were sold on the black market. Many turned to All India Radio to hear her ghazals.
This drastic action on the part of the authorities served only to increase her popularity. Her songs were banished from the airwaves. His stirring anthem Hum dekhein gey, Lazim hai ke hum bhi dekhein gey ("Our day will come! Assuredly our day will come") became the battle cry of the downtrodden thanks to her passionate yet controlled rendition.Īs punishment she was barred from all officially sponsored concerts and was not permitted to appear on television. In 1985 she appeared before a crowd of 50,000 people in Lahore and defiantly sang the verses of Faiz. Faiz's poetry was, of course, banned by the military government but Bano, by bringing it to the ears of the illiterate but poetry-loving masses, educated them and made them politically and socially aware. She rendered his revolutionary poetry memorably, imbuing it with a particular emotional immediacy. The secular, socialist poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, who after winning the Lenin Prize had to seek refuge abroad, was her hero. Trained in the classical Hindustani style of singing which is peculiar to north India and Pakistan, she decided to concentrate on ghazals (lyric poems in Urdu), and songs lamenting the condition of the hungry masses. It is not easy to draw comparisons, but Bano could be described in western musical terms as a combination of Maria Callas and Joan Baez. Iqbal Bano, who has died aged 74, will be remembered in the Indian subcontinent as the woman who took on the dictator President Zia ul-Haq, the general who hanged Pakistan's elected leader Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
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