Eidan Bai

Eidan Bai was Pakistani singing legend Noor Jehan's elder sister.

She was a stage singer, dancer and an actress in her early days. While starrin in the Urdu stage drama "Mallika", she fell in love with its writer Tanvir Naqvi and their marriage took place in Lahore in 1948, two years after Naqvi's debut as a lyricist in film "Anmol Ghadi" (1946). Their marriage lasted for 15 years and finally ended in a divorce in 1963.

When Noor Jehan was very young, she accompanied her elder sisters, Eidan Bai and Haider Baandi, in an Urdu song extolling the Holy Prophet of Islam, which became a hit. Its opening line was: Hanste hain sitaare, ya Shah-e-Madina and it was composed by Ghulam Ahmed Chisti. The director of the Punjabi film Pind Di Kudhi (1935), K.D. Mehra remember the popularity of the devotional song in Punjab some years earlier, and he put it in his movie although it being in Urdu, it was a bit of a misfit in a Punjabi movie.

In his book, Noor Jehan Ki Kahani Meri Zubani, Shaukat Hussain Rizvi recalls his first encounter with Noor Jehan. He wrote that she was no more than eight or nine. Once, he asked the manager of the Corinthian Theatre to go to Punjab and come back with some girls. The man came back with fifteen or twenty of them, among whom were the Noor Jehan sisters, the two elder ones, Eidan Bai and Haider Bandi, and the eight-year-old future queen of the Indian cinema. These girls were collectively called the Punjab Mail.