There is a short list of people from the pre-Partition Punjab whom both India and Pakistan still claim, and an even shorter list where neither side argues about it. Noor Jehan is at the top of both.
She was a major star of Bombay cinema when she left it. She then became the defining voice of a country that did not exist when she started singing. And for fifty years afterwards, in a period when almost nothing crossed the border, her records did.
Kasur
She was born Allah Wasai at Kasur, the small Punjabi town best known as the resting place of Bulleh Shah, on 21 September — 1926 by most accounts, 1925 by some. She was one of eleven children in a family of hereditary musicians, which in the Punjab of the 1920s meant a respected skill and a precarious living.
She started singing at about five. The training was classical and severe — the accounts describe hours daily, in the Patiala tradition, under teachers who did not make allowances for a child. Whatever else can be said about the film career that followed, the equipment behind it was that of a trained classical vocalist, and it is audible in the phrasing throughout her life.
Baby Noor Jehan
The family moved her into performance early. She sang with her sisters in touring theatre companies, and it was in Calcutta, working the stage circuit, that she acquired the name she kept: Baby Noor Jehan.
She appeared as a child in early Punjabi and Urdu films through the 1930s. There is a period here that is genuinely obscure — much of the output is lost, the credits are unreliable, and she was one of many child performers in a young industry. What is clear is that by her mid-teens she had stopped being a novelty.
Bombay
The turn came with Khandaan in 1942, in which she played a lead opposite Pran. It was a substantial hit, and she moved to Bombay with its director, Shaukat Hussain Rizvi, whom she married.
The five years that followed put her at the top of the Indian film industry. Badi Maa and Zeenat in 1945, Anmol Ghadi in 1946 — with music by Naushad, and songs that are still standards — and in 1947 Jugnu, opposite a young Dilip Kumar, and Mirza Sahiban, the film of the qissa.
The convention of the time was that a leading lady sang her own songs, and most did it adequately. Noor Jehan did it at a level that changed what was expected. The playback singers who dominated the following decades in India — Lata Mangeshkar foremost — grew up on those records, and said so.
1947
Partition came in the middle of all this. She and Rizvi moved to Lahore.
There is no fully satisfying account of why. Muslim professionals in the Bombay industry split both ways in 1947, and many stayed. What is clear is the scale of what she gave up: she left the largest film industry in Asia at the peak of her fame for one that did not yet exist, in a country three weeks old, where the studios were mostly empty because their staff had gone the other way.
Chann Wey
Pakistani cinema had to be built more or less from scratch, and she was among the people who built it.
In 1951 she directed Chann Wey, a Punjabi film in which she also starred and sang. It made her the first woman to direct a film in Pakistan, and it was a considerable commercial success at a moment when the industry badly needed one. She followed it with Dupatta in 1952, which did better still.
Her marriage to Rizvi ended in 1953. They had three children, among them the singer Zil-e-Huma. She later married the actor Ejaz Durrani, and that marriage ended too. Her private life was reported on relentlessly in a society that did not extend much latitude to a woman of her prominence, and she conducted it without visible apology.
The Voice of a Country
She stopped acting in the early 1960s — reportedly at Durrani's insistence, though she had in any case been moving that way — and became a playback singer, which is where the career that matters begins.
For roughly three decades she was the dominant female voice in Pakistani film music, across Urdu and, decisively, Punjabi. It is worth noticing what that meant. Urdu was the language of the new state's official culture; Punjabi film was the popular, rural, less respectable end of the industry. Noor Jehan sang Punjabi with total seriousness and enormous success, and in doing so kept a mass-audience Punjabi music culture alive in a country whose institutions were not much interested in supporting one.
Her phrasing carried the devotional and classical inheritance that also runs through qawwali — the long held note, the ornament used sparingly and then all at once, an attack that could go from a whisper to full voice inside a line.
1965
The title Malika-e-Tarannum — Queen of Melody — had been used of her before, but it fixed permanently in 1965.
During the war with India that September she recorded a series of songs for Radio Pakistan, sung for soldiers at the front and broadcast continuously. Ae watan ke sajeele jawano and the rest of that repertoire became, and remain, the standard patriotic music of the country. She visited the front lines to perform.
That episode makes her complicated, and it is more honest to say so than to leave it out. The same voice that Indian audiences had loved in 1946 was, in 1965, singing to Pakistani troops fighting India. Both facts are true, and the remarkable thing is how little either country has ever let the other one cancel it.
Afterwards
She sang into the 1990s. She received Pakistan's Pride of Performance and, later, the Sitara-e-Imtiaz, along with a long list of film awards.
She died in Karachi on 23 December 2000. The funeral drew enormous crowds, and the mourning was national in a way normally reserved for heads of state.
Why She Is Still Played
Estimates of her output run from a few thousand songs to around ten thousand, and the honest answer is that nobody knows: a great deal of early Pakistani film music was never properly catalogued and some of the prints and masters are gone.
What survives is the standard. Singers on both sides of the border cite her, and Punjabi singers in particular treat her as the point of origin — the person who established that the language could carry a full-scale popular vocal art without apologising for itself.
She was born in a Kasur that was in India, became a star in a Bombay that is in India, and died in a Karachi that is in Pakistan, having spent her life singing in a language that belongs to both and neither. There is no tidier summary of what happened to Punjab in the twentieth century, and no better argument that some of it survived.