Zaib-un-Nissa Hamidullah

Zaib-un-Nissa Hamidullah (জেবুন্নেসা হামিদুল্লাহ, ; 25 December 1918 – 10 September 2000) was a Pakistani writer and journalist.

She was a pioneer of Pakistani literature and journalism in English, and also a pioneer of feminism in Pakistan.

She was Pakistan's first female editor and publisher, and the country's first female columnist writing in English.

Zaibunnisa Street in Karachi was named after her.

Zaib-un-Nissa 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 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.

Zaib-un-Nissa first came into prominence in 1936, when a poem of hers was accepted for publication by Bombay's Illustrated Weekly of India.

In 1940, Zaib-un-Nissa married Khalifa Muhammad Hamidullah.

Unlike most marriages of the time, hers was not an arranged marriage.

She moved with him to the Punjab Province after their marriage.

He worked there as an executive for the Bata shoe company.

After moving to the Punjab in 1942, Zaib-un-Nissa was shocked.

Raised in an Anglo-Indian household, she found it hard to adjust to the very different lifestyle of her husband's large Punjabi family.

It took time for her to adjust, as she admitted in the foreword to The Young Wife.

They had two children: Nilofar (b. 1943) and Yasmine (b. 1949).

In 1943, her first book of poetry, Indian Bouquet, was published by her father's publishing house and proved to be very popular.

All copies of the first edition were sold in three months.

She followed up on her early success with Lotus Leaves, another book of poetry.

In 1945, Zaib-un-Nissa and her husband were in Simla at the time of the Simla Conference.

It was here that she met Fatima Jinnah.

Before independence in 1947, she wrote for many Indian newspapers, and was the first Muslim woman to write a column in an Indian newspaper.

After independence, her column in the newspaper Dawn made her the first female political commentator in Pakistan.

After she left Dawn, she became the founder and editor-publisher of the Mirror, the first social glossy magazine in Pakistan.

Due to her status as Pakistan's first female editor, she became the first woman to be included in press delegations sent to other countries.

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).

From then on, she was a regular contributor to that newspaper, until independence in 1947.

On one of these delegations, in 1955, she became the first woman to speak at the ancient al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt.

She also repeatedly represented Pakistan at the United Nations, including by serving as the deputy chief of the Pakistani delegation to the special 1970 session.

Hamidullah was the head of Bata's operations in Pakistan, and was sent to head Bata in Ireland in 1972.

All of her books were dedicated to him, proof of their devotion to one another.