Khan was born on 2 November 1965 in a Muslim family in
New Delhi.
[2] 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.
[6][7][a] According to Khan, his paternal grandfather, Jan Muhammad, an ethnic
Pashtun (Pathan), was from
Afghanistan.
[9][10] Shah Rukh Khan also said in his interviews that he is a Pathan (Pashtun) from Peshawar.
[11] 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.
[10] Meer was a follower of
Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan,
[12] and affiliated with the
All Indian National Congress.
[10] He moved to New Delhi in 1948
partition of India.
[13] Khan's mother, Lateef Fatima, was the daughter of a senior government engineer.
[14] His parents were married in 1959.[17] Khan described himself on Twitter as "half Hyderabadi (mother), half Pathan (father), [and] some Kashmiri (grandmother)".[18] 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.[10][19]