Bano performing at the Arts Council in Karachi.

What is written and what is sung in ghazal is not necessarily as it appears or sounds. Bano caught the cusp of change by presenting and delivering ghazals that took the once largely, if not wholly, devotional on to the political path. Whether singing the religious or the new, in the case of the ghazals of the new-wave poet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, she brought a new and personal dynamism to what she sang.