Shah Rukh Khan

Khan was born on 2 November 1965 into a Muslim family in New Delhi. He spent the first five years of his life in Mangalore, where his maternal grandfather, Iftikhar Ahmed, served as the chief engineer of the port in the 1960s. Khan’s father, Mir Taj Mohammed Khan, was an Indian independence activist from Peshawar who campaigned alongside the Khudai Khidmatgar, a nonviolent resistance movement led by Abdul Ghaffar Khan that sought a united and independent India. Mir was a follower of Abdul Ghaffar Khan,  and affiliated with the Indian National Congress. He was also the cousin of the major general in the Indian National Army Shah Nawaz Khan. As of 2010, Khan’s paternal family was still living in the Shah Wali Qataal area of Peshawar’s Qissa Khwani Bazaar. Mir moved to New Delhi in 1948 after the partition of India. Khan’s mother, Lateef Fatima, was the daughter of a senior government engineer. His parents were married in 1959. Khan described himself on Twitter as “half Hyderabadi (mother), half Pathan (father), and some Kashmiri (grandmother)”.  According to Khan his paternal grandfather, Mir Jan Muhammad Khan, was an ethnic Pashtun (Pathan) from Afghanistan. However, his paternal cousins in Peshawar later clarified that the family speaks Hindko and is originally from Kashmir, from where they settled in Peshawar centuries back, contradicting the claim that his grandfather was a Pashtun from Afghanistan. Although Khan was given the birth name Shahrukh Khan, he prefers his name to be written as Shah Rukh Khan, and is commonly referred to by the initialism SRK. He married Gauri Chibber, a Punjabi Hindu, in a traditional Hindu wedding ceremony on 25 October 1991, after a six-year courtship. They have a son Aryan (born 1997) and a daughter Suhana (born 2000). In 2013, they became parents of a third child, a son named AbRam, who was born through a surrogate mother. Both his elder children have expressed interest in entering the entertainment industry; Khan has stated that Aryan, who studied filmmaking at the USC School of Cinematic Arts in California, aspires to become a writer-director, while Suhana, who served as assistant director for Khan’s film Zero (2018), is studying drama and acting at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts for higher education. Suhana made her acting debut in November 2019, in a short film titled “The Grey Part of Blue.”According to Khan, while he strongly believes in Islam, he also values his wife’s religion. His children follow both religions; at his home the Qur’an is situated next to the Hindu deities.