Hoor Bano Panipati

Hoor Bano, today called Hoor Bano Panipati, was born in 1925 at Karnal District in Panipat, Haryana to an Urdu-speaking family. Three years after the death of her father in 1940, Ms. Bano got a teaching job at a school run in Amritsar where she taught for four years. At the time of Partition, Ms. Bano was at her residence with her family at Karnal for summer holidays. “It happened too quickly. We didn’t even get the time to react to the news...My grandmother was extremely ill. She could barely stand, let alone walk. We somehow managed to arrange a charpoy from a nearby village to carry her with us. That village was under attack by angry mobs and we saw many injured people running to join our convoy,” she recounts. Ms. Bano’s ailing grandmother passed away on the second day of their journey. Ms. Bano and the rest of her family were picked up by military trucks that took them to the refugee camp at Walton cantonment in Lahore. In 1954, Mrs. Bano was married to Syed Mubarak Ali Shah, founder of the Victory College on Nicholson Road. In 1963 her husband passed away and she took up the responsibility of bringing up her children along with running her husband’s institution. She taught at Victory College/Kinnaird High School for Girls for several decades and retired in 1992.