Early Life
Wali Khan was born on 11 January 1917, to a family of local landlords in the town of Utmanzai in Charsadda district of the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province of undivided India. His father, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (Bacha Khan), was a prominent Afghan (Pashtun) Nationalist and founder of the pacifist Khudai Khidmatgar ("Volenteer" in Pashto) movement. His mother, Mehar Qanda Khan, belonged to the nearby Razar village, and married Bacha Khan in 1912; she died during the flu pandemic after World War I.
Wali Khan, the second of three sons, received his early education from the Azad Islamia School in Utmanzai. In 1922, this school became part of a chain of schools his father had formed during his social reform activities. It was from this network of schools that the Khudai Khidmatgar movement developed, eventually challenging British authority in the North-West Frontier Province (now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) through non-violent protests and posing one of the most serious challenges to British rule in the region.
In May 1930, Wali Khan narrowly escaped being killed at the hands of a British soldier during a military crackdown in his home village. In 1933, he attended the government's Deradun Public School and completed his Senior Cambridge. He did not pursue further education because of recurring problems with his eyesight, which led to him wearing glasses for the rest of his life.
Despite his pacifist upbringing, as a young freedom fighter, Wali Khan seemed exasperated with the pacifism advocated by his father. He was to later explain his frustration to Gandhi, in a story he told Muklaika Bannerjee, "If the cook comes to slaughter this chicken's baby, is non-violence on the part of the chicken likely to save the younger life?" The story ended with a twinkle in his eye when he remembered Gandhiji's reply, "Wali, you seem to have done more research on violence than I have on non-violence." His first wife died in 1949 while Wali Khan was in prison. In 1954, he married Nasim Wali Khan, the daughter of an old Khudai Khidmatgar activist.
Read more about this topic: Khan Abdul Wali Khan
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