Maki Kureishi was born in Calcutta in 1927 into a Parsee family. Her psychiatrist father, Lt. Colonel Jal Dhunjibhoy, served in that elite, colonial corps, the Indian Medical Service. Her mother, Shireen Vacha, had grown up in Germany, where her father had been Professor of Languages at Berlin University and translated the Parsee (Zoroastrian) holy script
Avestainto German and English. Books were a part of family life and both Kureishi and her younger sister, later German filmmaker Roshan Beutener-Dhunjibhoy, were prodigious readers.
Kureishi spent her early childhood in Ranchi and came to Karachi in her early teens. At Partition in 1947 the family stayed on. This post-Partition city, the capital of Pakistan until the 1960s, provided the backdrop to Kureishi's poetry, whether she wrote
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Citation: Shamsie, Muneeza. "Maki Kureishi". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 20 June 2002 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=4995, accessed 21 November 2024.]
