On days when Brussels feels especially airless, I find myself going back to the songs and inspiring story of the mesmerising legendary Pakistani singer Noor Jehan who has stirred my soul since birth.
There are moments when the past is more alluring than the present. Memories buried safely for decades suddenly resurface, clamouring for attention. This week I had a day like this.
I had been struggling to make sense of EU Council President Antonio Costa’s “Partnership for Multilateralism” initiative while also keeping a close watch on Donald Trump’s anti-Iran rants and other stuff coming at us from leaders of our dark and desperate world.
It was painful and it wasn’t working. The words I wrote were dry and bloodless, the sentences convoluted, seemingly meaningless. I laboured to understand all the talk of war and killing, with not even a passing mention of peace.
My mind felt burdened and my heart just wasn’t in it. The Universe understood my restlessness and intervened. In a Eureka moment one morning, I knew I had to stop the spiral and find solace fast.
So I reached for my favourite Urdu ghazals and there she was on top of the list: the one-and-only Noor Jehan.
The legendary Pakistani singer and actress recorded for the last time in 1996 and died in 2000 at the age of 74. She would have turned 100 years old this year. Her soul-stirring voice still echoes in the homes, memories and imaginations of countless South Asians across the world.
I grew up with Noor Jehan’s songs the way other people grow up with lullabies. In fact, it all started with a lullaby.
As my mother loved to recount, the glamorous and stunningly beautiful “Malika-e-Tarranum” (Empress of Melody) – as she was often described by a besotted Pakistani public – came to visit my mother at the Lady Wellington hospital in Lahore only a day or so after my birth.
Noor Jehan knew my grandfather Hakim Nayyar Wasti and while visiting a friend at the hospital was told that Hakim Sahib’s daughter had just had a baby.
So it was that as my mother lay with a squalling newborn in her arms, Noor Jehan, radiantly beautiful as ever, walked in.
She introduced herself politely and before my mother knew what was happening, picked up a talcum powder tin on the bedside table, started tapping on it with her jewelled fingers and began to sing a lullaby to calm me down.
Apparently, I fell silent immediately.
The author as a baby with her mother, Abeeda Qamar ul Islam
The bewitchment, which started then, continued through my teenage years and followed me to Europe. I was crazy about Western pop and rock music of course but there were – and still are – times when only the magic of Urdu ghazals can fill that empty space in my soul.
And Noor Jehan can fill that space as no other.
As woman, actor, singer, wife and mother, Noor Jehan was spectacularly ahead of her time. She was born Allah Rakhi Wasai in Kasur in Pakistani Punjab, and took the stage name of the Mughal empress, Nur Jahan, (1577–1645) (“Light of the World”) who was a rare female sovereign in a dynasty built on masculine conquest. She ruled in all but name, shaping policy, patronage, and culture.
Noor Jehan, the singer, centuries later, conquered a different male-dominated empire: the world of South Asian cinema and music.
She did not merely sing in that world. She acted, directed and produced. She built studios. She survived changing tastes, political upheavals, personal turbulence and an industry – and a country – that was and remains often deeply uncomfortable with powerful women.
When she came to Pakistan after Partition in 1947, Lahore’s flourishing film industry had been devastated by the violence and upheaval surrounding Partition, with studios damaged or destroyed. Noor Jehan and her then-husband bought an old studio and helped rebuild the industry. Over a career spanning more than five decades, she recorded thousands of songs in Urdu, Punjabi, Sindhi and other languages and acted in countless films.
She could sing the poems of Faiz Ahmed Faiz with restrained passion and intensity and then become mischievous, playful and sensual in a Punjabi song. (Her videos can be seen on YouTube)
Growing up, I heard her voice on the radio, in the car going to school, on our long drives from Islamabad to Lahore and back, our weekends going up to Murree, on music programmes on television – and once or twice in real life on the stage.
My parents were admirers. I was also mesmerised. But not only by her voice and beauty but by her unapologetic and cheerful audacity and independence. She had managed to put a woman’s voice and presence bang at the centre of a still-patriarchal culture that struggles to take women seriously.
Noor Jehan was stunningly beautiful and she knew it. She played with make-up, enhancing those dramatic eyebrows, lining her twinkling, mischievous eyes with lashings of kohl, wearing fearless red lipstick, showcasing her luscious hair and her jewelry – rings on her fingers, jhumkas and big necklaces around her throat.
She wore saris – gorgeous, beautifully draped saris – defiantly and proudly even when Zia ul Haq, the then-dictator, decreed them un-Islamic.
Centenaries are often exercises in nostalgia. We dust off old photographs and replay the greatest hits. But Noor Jehan reminds us that there have always been South Asian women who refused to fit neatly into the boxes society constructed for them.
Her story tells us that, whatever our citizenship, art and culture know no borders, and that our South Asian history and shared memory refuse to be demarcated by neat colonially-demarked boundaries.
That is why when Brussels feels particularly airless, I find myself finding solace in books, poetry, music, art and films. Reading Arundhati Roy and Eqbal Ahmed, Kamila Shamsie and Edward Said. And listening to Noor Jehan, but also Farida Khanum, Iqbal Bano and Nayyara Noor.
And it is why amid the rants of Trump and the sombre talk of dying international orders, I find solace in the voice and story of a remarkable woman – a true feminist – who made space for tenderness, defiance and longing all at once.
The best way to honour Noor Jehan’s legacy is to keep our conversation going. So if you have a favourite Noor Jehan song or a memory attached to her voice I would love to hear it.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Lahore Times.
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