Nazia Hassan

Nazia Hassan was born in Karachi on April 3, 1965, into a family that moved comfortably between Pakistan and Britain. Her father, Basir Hassan, was a businessman, and her mother, Muniza Basir, worked in social welfare causes that would later influence her daughter's own charitable interests ^[1]. Nazia grew up alongside her younger brother Zoheb, who became her lifelong musical partner, and a younger sister. The family divided its time between Karachi and London, and this dual upbringing gave the siblings an ear for both Urdu film song and Western pop radio ^[2].

Music entered her life early. As a child in the 1970s she appeared on Pakistani television programmes, including children's shows broadcast from Karachi, where her clear voice and easy screen presence drew notice ^[1]. Schooling continued in London, where the family settled for long stretches. The city's record shops and disco era soundtrack were part of her adolescence, and she absorbed them without abandoning the Urdu language songs she had grown up singing.

Anyone asking who was Nazia Hassan before fame arrived would have found an ordinary, studious teenager. She took her education seriously throughout her life, a trait that later set her apart from most performers of her generation in South Asia ^[3].

The turning point came through a chance London meeting. In the late 1970s the Indian film actor and producer Feroz Khan was preparing his film Qurbani and wanted a fresh, modern sound for its soundtrack. He was introduced to the London based Indian producer Biddu, who had already scored international disco hits, and Biddu in turn brought in the teenage Nazia to sing a new composition ^[4]. The song was Aap Jaisa Koi, recorded when she was fifteen.

Qurbani was released in 1980 and Aap Jaisa Koi became a sensation across India and Pakistan. The track's breathy, restrained vocal over a disco arrangement sounded unlike anything in Hindi film music at the time, and it turned an unknown schoolgirl into a household name ^[2]. In 1981 she received the Filmfare Award for Best Female Playback Singer, becoming the first Pakistani citizen to win the award, and one of the youngest recipients in its history ^[4].

Rather than pursue a playback career in Bombay, Nazia chose a different route. She and Zoheb signed with EMI to record an album of original pop songs in Urdu and Hindi, produced by Biddu in London. It was a gamble: at the time South Asia had almost no market for album based pop music outside the film industry ^[5].

The gamble paid off spectacularly. Disco Deewane, released in 1981, sold in numbers that stunned the industry, topping charts in Pakistan and India and finding buyers as far away as the West Indies and Southeast Asia ^[5]. Contemporary press reports described it as one of the best selling Asian pop records of its era. The title track, with its pulsing bass line and Nazia's cool delivery, effectively created the template for South Asian pop as a genre independent of cinema ^[2].

The siblings followed with a string of albums through the 1980s: Boom Boom (1982), which doubled as the soundtrack of the film Star, Young Tarang (1984), and Hotline (1987) ^[1]. Young Tarang carried another distinction: its promotional videos, shot in London, were among the first music videos made for Pakistani pop songs. Their final studio album, Camera Camera, appeared in 1992 and was accompanied by a campaign against drug use ^[3].

Any list of Nazia Hassan achievements has to include her role on television as well. In the 1980s she and Zoheb hosted Music '89, a stage show on Pakistan Television produced by Shoaib Mansoor that gave early exposure to a new generation of Pakistani bands and singers ^[6]. At a time when pop music faced official disapproval in Pakistan, the programme signalled that the genre had a public and a future. Among the widely cited Nazia Hassan facts is her recognition by the state: the government of Pakistan awarded her the Pride of Performance, one of the country's highest civil honours, in 2002, conferred after her death ^[1].

Away from music, Nazia built a life that had little to do with celebrity. She completed a degree in business administration and law studies in London, and in the 1990s she worked at the United Nations in New York, including an association with UNICEF's work for children ^[3]. Colleagues from that period recalled that many did not know she was a famous singer at all. She had said in interviews that music was one part of her life rather than the whole of it.

Her charitable work was constant and mostly quiet. She supported causes for underprivileged children in Karachi, and the anti drug message of her last album reflected campaigns she and Zoheb lent their names to in Pakistan ^[6]. Friends and family later established the Nazia Hassan Foundation to continue this work in her memory ^[1].

In March 1995 she married the Karachi businessman Mirza Ishtiaq Baig. The couple had a son, Arez, born in 1997. The marriage was unhappy and the two divorced in 2000, a matter of weeks before her death, a sequence of events that was reported extensively in the Pakistani press ^[6].

By the mid 1990s Nazia had stepped back from recording. Camera Camera in 1992 proved to be the last album she and Zoheb released together, and she devoted the following years to her studies, her United Nations work, and her family ^[3]. She spoke of the pop scene she had helped create with a mixture of pride and detachment, content to watch younger Pakistani acts fill stadiums on ground she had cleared a decade earlier.

Her health then collapsed. She was diagnosed with lung cancer, and despite treatment in London her condition worsened through 2000. Nazia Hassan died in London on August 13, 2000, three days after receiving her divorce papers, at the age of thirty five ^[2]. She was buried at Hendon Cemetery in north London under Islamic rites, and her death led news bulletins across Pakistan and drew tributes from India as well ^[7].

The shock of her early death was compounded by public disputes that followed, including allegations aired by her family about her final months, which kept her name in the headlines long after the funeral ^[6]. Through it all, the music remained the point: radio stations across South Asia marked her passing by playing Aap Jaisa Koi and Disco Deewane on repeat.

Any serious Nazia Hassan biography ends with an argument about influence, and hers is unusually easy to make. Before Disco Deewane, popular music in Pakistan and India lived almost entirely inside the film industry. After it, a self contained pop market existed: albums by named artists, music videos, television countdown shows, and eventually the private channels that built on that audience ^[5]. Musicians from Pakistan's rock and pop boom of the 1980s and 1990s have repeatedly named her as the artist who made their careers imaginable ^[6].

Her recordings keep resurfacing. The title song of Disco Deewane was reworked for the 2012 Bollywood film Student of the Year, introducing her melody to listeners born after her death, and Aap Jaisa Koi has been sampled, covered, and reissued many times ^[2]. Critics in both countries routinely place her albums among the most important South Asian pop records ever made.

Honours accumulated after 2000. Beyond the Pride of Performance, she has been remembered with tribute concerts, documentaries, and anniversary retrospectives in the Pakistani and Indian press each August ^[7]. For a singer who released her last album at twenty seven, the durability of her catalogue is the clearest measure of what she built: a young woman from Karachi who gave South Asian pop its founding voice.