 Khan was born on 2 November 1965 in a Muslim family in New Delhi. He spent the first five years of his life in Mangalore, where his maternal grandfather, Ifthikar Ahmed, served as the chief engineer of the port in the 1960s. According to Khan, his paternal grandfather, Jan Muhammad, an ethnic Pathan was from Afghanistan. Shah Rukh Khan also said in his interviews that he is a Pathan from Peshawar and his entire family used to speak Hindko language at home. Khan's father, Meer Taj Mohammed Khan, was an Indian independence activist in Peshawar, British India (present-day Pakistan). As of 2010, Khan's paternal family was still living in Shah Wali Qataal area of Peshawar's Qissa Khawani Bazaar. Meer was a follower of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, and affiliated with the All Indian National Congress. He moved to New Delhi in 1948 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)". His paternal cousins in Peshawar claim that the family is of Hindkowan origin from Kashmir, not Pashtun, and also contradict the claim that his grandfather was from Afghanistan.
