[2] She was an educationist, women's liberation activist, deputy director of education and later a legislator in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir.
[3] She was associated with the activities of the All India Women's Conference and was its secretary before partition, but a chance meeting with Muhammad Ali Jinnah and his sister, Fatima Jinnah in Kashmir, who would later visit the family for banquets, influenced her and she left the conference to concentrate her efforts in women's liberation movements in the pre-independent India.
[3][4] Begum Ali was born in 1901 to Khan Bahadur Aga Syed Hussain Thakur, Home and Judicial Minister during Maharaja Hari Singh's rule.
[4] Begum was married to Agha Zaffar Ali Qizilbash, a scion of an aristocratic Afghan family settled in the Kashmir region of India.
Begum's youngest son is Agha Ashraf Ali, an academic who retired as Commissioner of Higher Education in Jammu and Kashmir[2] The Veiled Suite: The Collected Poem, an anthology written by her grandson Agha Shahid Ali, a noted Kashmiri-American poet, features a poem in memory of her.