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Obituaries
Singer Iqbal Bano dies
By CMU Editorial | Published on Thursday 23 April 2009
Singing star Iqbal Bano has died in Pakistan following a short illness. She was 74.
Bano was born in Delhi and developed an early love of music. She studied classical music as well as the semi-classical music she became most famous for – traditional forms such as thumris, dadras and the classical rendition of ghazals, a type of Urdu poetry – and also went on to sing a number of easy listening tracks in 1950s films.
She married and moved to Pakistan in the early fifties, and in the 1980s she became something of a cult figure there for singing revolutionary songs by acclaimed poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz which had been banned by Gen Zia ul-Haq’s government. She was also popular in Iran and Afghanistan for her renditions of Persian poetry.
She is survived by two sons and a daughter.
