Begum Parveen Sultana

Parveen Sultana was born in 1950 at Puranigudam in Nagaon district, Assam, to Ikramul Majid and Marufa Majid. Some sources give 24 May as the date; most give only the year. Her mother is said to have noticed her humming along with her father's riyaaz at about five, and formal training followed.

Her principal teacher was the scholar-musician Pandit Chinmoy Lahiri, known for drawing together the ideas of nine gharanas. One account has him testing her at ten with a rendering of Raga Yaman before accepting her. At his home she met the Kirana gharana vocalist Dilshad Khan; they studied together, performed together and married.

She gave her first public concert at twelve, in 1962, on the grounds of Darbhanga Palace in Calcutta. Her playback career began three years later with the Assamese film Morom Trishna, and she went on to sing for Hindi films including Parwana, Pakeezah, Do Boond Paani and Kudrat. "Hamein Tumse Pyaar Kitna", from Kudrat, won her the Filmfare award for best female playback singer in 1982.

She was made Padma Shri in 1976, at twenty-six, and Padma Bhushan in 2014. She has recorded for His Master's Voice, Polydor, Music India, Auvidis, Magnasound and others, and has continued to perform into the 2020s, at Sawai Gandharva and abroad, including two appearances at the Darbar Festival in London in 2008 and 2018. She and Dilshad Khan have a daughter, Shadab.

What listeners remember first is the range — described as nearly four octaves, and sometimes more — and the ease with which she moves through it. Within the Patiala idiom she keeps the gharana's dense ornamentation, its taans and its rhythmic play, but sets them against a tonal palette wider than most khayal singing allows.

She has never treated the boundaries between forms as fixed. Khayal gives way to thumri, ghazal and bhajan in a single concert, and her view, stated plainly in interviews, is that musicians should open their ears to ideas outside their own tradition. The jugalbandis with Dilshad Khan — Patiala set against Kirana, two idioms interwoven in duet — became a distinctive strand of her work. That she also sang playback for cinema without stepping away from classical performance did a great deal to carry Hindustani vocal music to listeners who would never have sought it out.