Zaib-un-Nissa Hamidullah

Early life Zaib-un-Nissa was born in 1918 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 Muhammad Iqbal into Bengali, and was an avid Bengali and Indian 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 to express her thoughts and emotions. Her later writing was affected by her trips to rural areas of Bengal and the Punjab, including her father's birthplace, the Bengal village of Borotajpur (a village near Janai, Hooghly). She was educated at the Loreto House Convent, where she completed her Senior Cambridge qualifications. She published her first poem in The Illustrated Weekly of India in 1933, at age 15. At 18, she won a poetry competition sponsored by England's Daily Mirror for a poem she had published in The Star of India − a publication that later became part of the Dawn group of papers, for which she eventually wrote.

Marriage

In 1940, Zaib-un-Nissa married Khalifa Muhammad Hamidullah. Unlike most marriages of the time, hers was not an arranged marriage. After their marriage, she moved with him to the Punjab Province, where he worked as an executive for the Bata shoe company. During independence in 1947, she and her husband helped refugees coming across the border from India.

Her husband belonged to a well-known Punjabi family. His father, Khalifa Mohammad Asadullah, was the librarian of the Imperial Library in Calcutta (now Kolkata). Hamidullah was the head of Bata's operations in Pakistan, and was sent to head Bata in Ireland in 1972.

Legacy After Zaib-un-Nissa's death, her copyright passed to her younger daughter, Yasmine S. Ahmed. This included the right to all her pictures, works, etc. Due to popular demand, a fourth edition of The Young Wife and Other Stories was published by Oxford University Press, Pakistan in August 2008.