In 1945, Zeb-un-Nissa and her husband were in the Himachal Pradesh area at the time of the Simla Conference, which was a meeting between the British Viceroy and the political leaders of British India. Her first daughter Nilofar was born in Punjab in 1943. This dramatic change in lifestyle – the contrast between her own Anglo-Indian upbringing and the sprawling families of Punjabi culture – is referred to in her short story collection The Young Wife. In 1942, she moved to Punjab with her husband. It wasįollowed by a second collection, Lotus Leaves. The first edition sold out in three months. In 1941, she published a book of poetry – Indian Bouquet –

She continued to contribute to that paper up until In 1936, one of her poems was published by Bombay’s Illustrated Newspapers, being the first Muslim woman to write a column published in an It was a love marriage, and Zeb-un-Nissa would dedicate all her novels to her husband. In 1940, she married Khalifa Muhammad Hamidullah, a businessman from a well-known Punjabi family. Zeb-un-Nissa attended a Catholic girls’ school, the Loreto School, in then Calcutta.

Her mother, Eleanor Saxby, had nursed her father through a period of ill-health while he was studying at Cambridge: a relationship which developed into his second marriage. Her father, S Wajid Ali, was a Bengali nationalist and himself a writer and publisher, who had translated the writings of Iqbal into Bengali. Born Zeb-un-Nissa Ali, she grew up in a literary family in Calcutta, where the family home served as a salon for the local intelligentsia. Journalist, poet, novelist and political commentator, Zeb-un-Nissa Hamidullah was one of the first South Asian women journalists, and the first female editor and publisher in Pakistan. Photo Source: Mrs Yasmine Shahid Ahmed, daughter of Zaib-un-Nissa Hamidullah via WikiMedia

Yasmin khan political commentator