Zaib-un-Nissa Hamidullah - Early Life

Early Life

Zeb-un-Nissa Ali was born in 1921 to a literary family in Calcutta; her father, S. Wajid Ali, was the first person to translate the writings of the well-known Urdu poet Iqbal into Bengali, and was an avid Bengali nationalist and writer. She had two brothers, and one half-brother from her mother's second marriage. She grew up in a tightly-knit Anglo-Indian household filled with Bengali thinkers and philosophers of the age, as her father's house at 48, Jhowtalla Road, was something of a meeting place for the Calcutta literary circle. She started to write at an early age, and received considerable support from both her English mother and Bengali father. A lonely child, Zeb-un-Nissa took to writing poetry as a means for expressing her thoughts and emotions. Her later writing was affected by her trips to rural areas of Bengal and Punjab, including her father's birthplace, the Bengali village of Tajpur. She was educated at the Loreto House convent.