The walls around the music

There is a woman in my family who sings old Indian film songs and ghazals in a voice that stops time. At weddings, at gatherings, at the quiet celebrations that orbit a Pakistani household, she sings with a musical intelligence, an instinctive sense of phrasing, of where to let a note fall that I have never heard matched in any formal setting. She still sings at times.

She has almost never performed in public.

Nobody decided this out loud. There was no decree, no intervention, no prohibition anyone could point to. It was simply understood, the way so many things are simply understood in our culture, that her voice belonged to the room, and the room only. Beyond those walls, other things were permissible. Beyond those walls, she was a woman. The music stayed inside.

I see a version of this story everywhere I look. Female friends who sang beautifully at church gatherings, at family ceremonies, in Christian and Muslim households alike, voices of real quality, real feeling, who never took those voices into the world. The gift was always present. The permission was not.

This piece is an attempt to understand why. Not in a spirit of grievance, but in a spirit of genuine inquiry. Because the gap between what women can do musically and what Pakistani music publicly acknowledges them doing is not a small oversight. It is a structural condition. And it is worth examining honestly.

Pakistan has produced female singers of towering stature. Noor Jehan, Malika-e-Tarannum, the Queen of Melody, sang over 2,500 songs for Pakistani cinema and is considered one of the greatest voices the subcontinent has ever produced. Iqbal Bano sang Faiz Ahmed Faiz in front of 50,000 people in Lahore, wearing a black sari in deliberate defiance of a regime that had tried to ban the garment. Abida Parveen has carried Sufi devotional music to audiences across the world. Farida Khanum, Roshan Ara Begum, Reshma, the names accumulate.

But notice what all these names have in common. They are singers. All of them. The voice, it seems, is the one instrument Pakistan has consistently permitted women to play in public.

Step outside the territory of the voice and the landscape changes almost completely. Who are Pakistan's female instrumentalists? Who are the female composers, the female music directors who have shaped the sound of a Lahore film or a radio broadcast? Who holds the title of Ustad — the master — as a woman? Which gharana, those ancient hereditary lineages of classical musical knowledge, has a woman at its head? Who are the female executives who have built music companies, founded labels, run the business of music?

The answers are nearly all the same: there are very few, and most of those few have been forgotten.

This is not a Pakistani peculiarity alone; women have historically been underrepresented in the instrumental and administrative dimensions of music across South Asia and beyond. But Pakistan's case has particular characteristics, rooted in particular histories that are worth examining on their own terms.

It is important to begin with what existed before what exists now. Before 1947, Lahore was one of the great musical cities of the Indian subcontinent. The Patiala gharana, today Pakistan's most celebrated classical lineage, was rooted in Punjab. The Gandharva Mahavidyalaya, India's first music university, was established in Lahore in 1901. The city hummed with hereditary musicians, court singers, shrine performers, and a rich informal tradition of musical knowledge passed across generations.

Women were not absent from this landscape. They were, in some ways, central to it. The miraasans, women from the hereditary mirasi musician communities, performed at Sufi shrines and ceremonial gatherings across Punjab, singing in obscure ragas that have since largely vanished. Historical researcher Radha Kapuria, in her work on colonial Punjab, documents the considerable presence of female performers in the courts of Ranjit Singh and the princely states that followed.

There is also the case of Goki Bai, a figure almost entirely absent from the popular memory of Pakistani classical music, without whom the Patiala gharana as it exists today would not have its shape. She was the crucial pedagogical link between the early 19th-century maestro Ustad Behram Khan and the pair Ali Bakhsh and Fateh Ali, recognised as the founders of the Patiala lineage. She trained them. The gharana's official genealogy, traced patrilineally as all gharana lineages are, does not foreground her name. This is not unusual, it is the rule.

Musical lineage in the Hindustani gharana system is traced through the male line. Women who were taught, or taught others, or formed the connective tissue of knowledge between generations, appear in footnotes, if they appear at all. The system was not designed to remember them.

Before British colonialism reshaped the subcontinent's moral landscape, the tawaif, the courtesan, occupied a complex and respected place in North Indian cultural life. She was not merely an entertainer. She was a trained multi-instrumentalist, a poet, a keeper of classical knowledge, a figure of refinement whom the educated and the powerful considered worth knowing. Tawaifs from Lahore's Heera Mandi were central to the city's musical world.

British Victorian morality, combined with the rising nationalist movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries, systematically delegitimised this world. The tawaif was recast as merely a sex worker, her artistry ignored, her knowledge devalued, the distinction between performer and prostitute deliberately collapsed. Pakistan's post-Partition project of Islamic identity deepened this collapse. As Dawn has noted, Pakistan's episteme has never fully managed to separate the performer from the sex worker when the performer is a woman.

The consequence is structural. A respectable woman from a non-musician family who wants to perform music in public in Pakistan carries, whether she knows it or not, the shadow of this collapsed distinction. The voice, disembodied, intimate, associated with religious devotion and domestic celebration is somewhat sheltered from this shadow. The instrument is not. Sitting at a tabla, holding a sitar, playing a harmonium on a stage, these acts place a woman's body in a professional, public, sustained relationship with a performance space that is still, in the social imagination, associated with the kotha.

The gharana system those hereditary lineages of musical knowledge that have structured North Indian classical music for centuries is built on a patrilineal model. The ustad passes his knowledge to his sons, his nephews, his male disciples. The lineage descends through men. Women in gharana households learned music, often to a very high level, but they were, as a rule, not the ones who transmitted it publicly, who took disciples, who represented the gharana's face to the world.

The title of Ustad, literally 'master,' the honorific that confers musical authority, has historically been given to men. As the Indian musicologist and writer on women in classical music has observed, a Muslim male musician would be an Ustad; a Hindu male musician would be a Pandit; a woman musician remained a 'bai.' Not a title of authority, but a label. Not a lineage-bearer but a practitioner. The denial of the title is not cosmetic, it is a denial of the right to transmit, to be a source, to be an authority in the tradition.

One searches the roster of Pakistan's gharanas today, the Patiala gharana, the Talwandi gharana of dhrupad, for a woman at the head of any lineage. One searches in vain. This is not because women lacked the knowledge. It is because the system was not designed to recognise their authority as knowledge-holders.

Music in Punjab has historically been the profession of the miraasi communities, hereditary musician castes of low social status whose identity was defined by their role as performers, genealogists, and musical servants of higher-caste patrons. This association between music-making as a profession and low social status created a powerful social trap for women from respectable families.

For a woman from a middle-class or upper-class Pakistani family, pursuing music professionally, not just singing at a wedding, but training seriously, performing publicly, earning money from music, building a life in it, meant associating herself with a social category that 'good' families worked hard to distinguish themselves from. The stigma was doubled for women: not just the stigma of music's low-caste associations, but the added weight of being a woman who was visible, professional, and economically engaged in that world. The two stigmas reinforced each other.

This is why, in my observation across my own social circles, women of considerable musical talent sang beautifully in private, at weddings, celebrations across different households and then stopped. The talent was real. The professional pathway was structurally blocked at every level: by family expectation, by social stigma, by the absence of role models, and by the absence of safe, accessible infrastructure.

The military dictatorship of General Zia was not, strictly speaking, a total ban on music. But it was a sustained, institutionalised campaign to narrow the public space for cultural expression and women bore a disproportionate share of its weight. Cinema declined from over 1,300 screens to barely 35 by the 1990s. Concerts were suppressed. Schools lost their extracurricular activities. Public space contracted.

The women who performed publicly during this era did so at considerable personal cost. Iqbal Bano, singing Faiz's 'Hum Dekhenge' in a banned black sari at Lahore's Al-Hamra Hall in 1985, was subsequently banned from appearing on national television and stage. She became a symbol of defiance but the cost of defiance was precisely that: silence enforced by the state.

The Zia era did not create the exclusion of women from Pakistani musical life. But it deepened and formalised it, embedding conservative social norms into institutional structures, schools, broadcasting, public space, that outlasted the regime. The music industry that re-emerged in its aftermath was one in which male dominance had been further entrenched.
Numbers, when they are available, are instructive. When they are absent, their very absence is the data.

I hold a Master's degree in Music at the University College of Arts and Design. Over two years of study, there was one female student in the cohort. A second enrolled briefly and left before completing the programme. There were no female instructors, not one, in any musical subject across the entire course. This was not experienced as unusual. It was simply the landscape.

The National Music Academy, Lahore, follows a similar pattern: fewer female students than male, and dramatically fewer female teachers. Not zero, but few. And the gap between students and teachers is itself a data point about the pipeline: women may be permitted, in small numbers, to learn. They are rarely permitted to become the ones who know.

As Natasha Noorani, singer, ethnomusicologist, and co-founder of the Lahore Music Meet, said in an interview: “There are plenty of talented female singers, composers, musicians and producers in Pakistan. The problem is barrier to entry. Considering how sketchy and inaccessible things such as studio spaces can be, it's yet another hurdle for women to deal with both in learning and in recording their music.”

The barrier is not always visible. It is not always a locked door. It is often the absence of a key, a female instructor to look up to, a studio environment that feels safe, a family that views serious music education as a legitimate path for a daughter, a concert audience where you do not feel conspicuous. Without these things, even the most talented women tend to keep their music where it began: inside the room.

Shamim Nazli was born in 1940 in Faisalabad. She was the sister of the celebrated playback singer Mala. She composed music for Pakistani films, a field so comprehensively dominated by men that her entry into it was, by any measure, extraordinary.

She composed the music for two Urdu films: Baharen Phir Bhi Ayein Gi in 1969 and Bin Badal Barsaat in 1975. The second film ran for 54 weeks in Karachi, achieving Golden Jubilee status. Critics credited its success largely to Nazli's music. She died in 2010.

In the more than 75-year history of Pakistani cinema, she remains, as far as my research can establish -- I would be glad to know if there are more, the only woman to have composed and directed music for Lollywood films.

Nazli’s story reveals the mechanism clearly. Despite her competence, proven by a commercially successful film, she was not given more assignments. It is reported that the Tafo brothers, who dominated the instrumental scene in Lollywood at the time, would refuse to cooperate with any composer they perceived as a threat to their dominance. Whether or not this specific account is fully accurate, it captures something true: the informal gatekeeping of a male-dominated industry is often more effective than any formal exclusion.

Nazli believed in creating original music, and she did not accept what certain producers demanded of her. She composed, and then she was not commissioned. And so the history of Pakistani film music contains one name where there should be many.

It is useful to place Pakistan's situation in a comparative frame not to judge, but to understand.

India, which shares the same gharana system and many of the same social attitudes toward women in music, has nonetheless produced more visible female instrumentalists. Annapurna Devi, surbahar virtuoso and daughter of Ustad Allauddin Khan, became one of the 20th century's great musicians, though she spent most of her career teaching privately rather than performing, in part due to the suffocating dynamics of her marriage to Ravi Shankar. Sharan Rani played the sarod. A new generation of female instrumentalists in Hindustani music, violinists, flutists, sitar players, is now gaining visibility through social media and dedicated platforms. The barriers are real in India too. They are somewhat lower.

Turkey presents a starker contrast. The Ottoman court produced accomplished female multi-instrumentalists, Dilhayat Kalfa and Ayşe Sultan among them and the modernising Turkish republic of the 20th century built on this tradition. Female instrumentalists and composers have been part of Turkey's musical mainstream for decades. İdil Biret and Gülsin Onay are internationally recognised pianists. Sefika Kutluer is a flute virtuoso. These are not exceptions, they are part of a landscape.

Iran offers a cautionary parallel in the opposite direction. After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, women were formally banned from performing publicly for mixed-gender audiences. Female musicians went underground or into exile. The ban has been partially relaxed and endlessly contested since, but its existence as formal policy reveals what informal exclusion in Pakistan has achieved without needing to be written into law.

Pakistan sits in an uncomfortable middle: no formal ban, but an informal architecture of exclusion that has been equally effective.

At the All Pakistan Music Conference, one of the country's premier showcases of classical music, the handful of female performers who do appear are, almost without exception, singers. The audience, too, skews heavily male. This is personal observation, not a surveyed statistic, and it is offered as such. But it is an observation that others in Pakistani music circles have made consistently.

The gap is not only on the stage. It is in who feels that the concert hall is a space for them. A woman walking into a classical music conference or a rock show as an audience member enters a space where her presence is already in the minority. This is not a trivial detail. It means that the next generation of female musicians is forming in a world where the audience, the community that sustains and validates musical ambition, is already telling a particular story about who music is for.
And still something is moving.

Natasha Noorani, a singer, ethnomusicologist, co-founder of the Lahore Music Meet, former General Manager of Coke Studio Season 10, and manager of the band Strings, is, by any reasonable measure, a music executive. She built a festival from the ground up that has, over ten years, showcased over 150 Pakistani artists and held over 200 sessions on music and culture. The Lahore Music Meet was founded and directed by women: Noorani, Zahra Paracha, Noor Habib, Ayesha Haroon. When you walk into LMM, you are walking into a music institution run by women.

Zahra Paracha is a guitarist, producer, and songwriter who has worked across genres and bands, Sikandar Ka Mandar, Biryani Brothers and co-produced music for the Netflix series Class. Natasha Humera Ejaz, based in Islamabad, founded her own independent label, Tiny Dancer Live, and holds a certificate in audio production from the International College of Music in Kuala Lumpur. These are not just performers, they are builders.

Eva B raps in a veil and makes music about Lyari. Annural Khalid became the most-streamed Pakistani woman artist of 2024 without any major label machinery behind her. Shae Gill's voice is on Pasoori, the most-heard Pakistani song of this decade. Women are producing, engineering, writing, performing, and organising in ways that simply did not have structural support a generation ago.

Digital platforms have made part of this possible. Spotify's EQUAL Pakistan programme, social media, YouTube, and the global reach of streaming have allowed female artists to build audiences without passing through the traditional gatekeepers, the studio owners, the label heads, the old-boy networks of the industry. The infrastructure is imperfect and the access is unequal. But the bypass exists. And women are using it.

Music education, too, is slowly changing. There are more female students in music programmes than there were a decade ago, even if the numbers still trail far behind. The conversation about women in music, their challenges, their barriers, their rights to the same professional respect as their male peers, is being had publicly, in print, at festivals, in classrooms. A generation ago, this conversation was largely absent from public discourse.

My aunt still sings at family gatherings. Old film songs. Ghazals. Folk melodies that she carries from some deep place in her memory. She sings with the same quality she has always had, a richness and accuracy and feeling that you do not learn. You are born with it, or you are not.

She has never been asked why she did not perform publicly. The question has no obvious answer. No one decided this. It was simply understood, in the way that so many of the most consequential decisions in Pakistani musical culture have been 'simply understood': through a silence that passes from one generation to the next without ever needing to be spoken.
But silences can be named. They can be examined. And once examined, they are no longer quite as simply understood as they were before.

The story of women in Pakistan's music is not a story of absent talent. The talent is visible everywhere at weddings, at churches, at family gatherings, at the small performances and social media uploads that accumulate quietly and without institutional support. The story is one of absent infrastructure: the teachers, the titles, the studios, the stages, the contracts, the communities that tell a young woman with musical gifts that those gifts are worth taking seriously beyond the walls of the room.

That infrastructure is being built. Slowly, by women who decided not to wait for permission. What they are building deserves not just our attention, but the industry's serious investment, in music education, in safe performance spaces, in commissioning female composers and music directors, in acknowledging female knowledge-holders with the titles and authority they have earned.

The voice, as it turns out, was never the whole story. It was just the part we were allowed to hear.

 

The writer is a music enthusiast and cultural critic. He writes about the intersection of music, society, and the human condition. He can be reached at brian.bassanio@gmail.co

All facts and info are the sole responsibility of the writer