[2] Barkat Ali Khan was born in 1908 in Kasur in the Punjab province of then British India.
[3] After 1947 Partition of British India, Barkat Ali Khan, with his family, migrated to Pakistan and focused on the lighter aspects of Hindustani classical music.
[4] Many still consider him a superior thumri singer than his elder brother, though he didn't receive acknowledgement to the extent Bade Ghulam Ali Khan did.
Before Mehdi Hassan became known as the 'King of ghazals' in the 1970s, Barkat Ali Khan and Begum Akhtar were considered the stalwarts of ghazal-singing during the 1950s and 1960s.
Barkat Ali Khan, in a rare live radio interview to Radio Pakistan, Lahore, had said," My forefathers, at one time, lived in the hilly tracts of Jammu and Kashmir, so they used to sing 'songs of the hills' (Pahari Geet).