Early life
Khan was born on 11 January 1917, to a family of local landlords in the town of Utmanzai in Charsadda district of the North-West Frontier Province(NWFP). His father, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, was a prominent Pashtun Nationalist and confidante of Gandhi. He was a non-violent freedom fighter who founded the pacifist Khudai Khidmatgar (Servants of God) movement. His mother, Mehar Qanda, belonged to the nearby Razar village, married Bacha Khan in 1912; she died during the flu pandemic after World War I.
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 through non-violent protest and posing one of the most serious challenges to British rule in the region.[3]
In May 1930, Khan narrowly escaped being killed at the hands of a British soldier during a military crackdown in his home village.[4] In 1933, he attended the Irish 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, Khan seemed exasperated with the pacificism advocated by his father and Gandhi. 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.”[5] His first wife died in 1949 while Khan was in prison. In 1954, he married Nasim Wali Khan, the daughter of an old Khudai Khidmatgar .
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