Munawwar Humayun Khan

Munawar Humayun Khan arranged 40 visas for Partition witnesses in Delhi to visit their hometown of Lahore for the first time.

She was born in 1941 to a Pashto-speaking family in Mardan in the North West Frontier Province. Mrs. Khan’s maternal grandfather Qazi Ataullah was a close associate of Abdul Ghaffar Khan, founder of the Khudai Khidmatgars, a political movement which was focused on gaining Independence through nonviolence. At the time of Partition, Mrs. Khan was six years old. In 1958, Mrs. Khan was enrolled at Kinnaird College for Women in Lahore from where she obtained her Bachelor of Arts in Education. She was married in 1961 to Dr. Humayun Khan, a Civil Services of Pakistan Officer at the time. Mrs. Khan fondly remembers her trip to Delhi with her husband in the 1980’s during his time as High Commissioner to India. She met many of her grandfather’s friends who’d relocated from Mardan to Delhi and also met many students from her college. “I met with 40 Indian women who had graduated from Kinnaird College in 1947,” she says. “They missed Lahore terribly and wouldn’t stop asking me about it, so a thought occurred to me to arrange visas for them to visit Lahore,” she says. In 1986, her husband was able to arrange visas for the 40 Kinnaird graduates and helped them reunite with their alma mater in Lahore.
In 1989, Mrs. Khan was elected Chairperson for the Sarhad Rural Support Programme (SRSP) founded by Partition witness Mr. Shoaib Sultan Khan. It aims to reduce poverty and initiate sustainable means of livelihoods in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.