Mahathir was born at his parents' home in a poor neighbourhood of Alor Setar, the capital of the state of Kedah, British Malaya, on 10 July 1925.[3] Mahathir's birth certificate gives his date of birth as 20 December. He was actually born on 10 July; his biographer Barry Wain explains that 20 December was an "arbitrary" date. Mahathir's father, Mohamed Iskander Kutty, is of Indian ancestry, hailing from Thalassery town, located in the Kannur district in the state of Kerala, India, while his mother Wan Tempawan, was from Kedah, of Malay descent respectively.[4][5] An aspect of Mahathir's birth set him apart: he was not born into the aristocracy or a prominent religious or political family.[6][N 1] Mahathir's father was a school principal whose low socio-economic status meant his daughters were unable to enroll in secondary school, while Wan Tempawan had only a distant relationship to Kedah's royalty. Both parents had been married previously; Mahathir had six half-siblings and two full-siblings.[7]
A large two storey building with two wings, painted yellow and white with a red tiled roof
The former Government English School in Alor Setar, the secondary school attended by Mahathir and founded by his father, now the Sultan Abdul Hamid College[9]
Mahathir was a hard-working student. Discipline imposed by his father motivated him to study, and he showed little interest in sports. He won a position in a selective English medium secondary school, having become fluent in English well ahead of his primary school peers.[10] With schools closed during the Japanese occupation of Malaya during World War II, he went into business, first selling coffee and later pisang goreng (banana fritters) and other snacks.[3] After the war, he graduated from secondary school with high marks and enrolled to study medicine at the King Edward VII College of Medicine in Singapore (now part of National University of Singapore).[11] There he met his future wife, Siti Hasmah Mohamad Ali, a fellow medical student. After he graduated, Mahathir worked as a doctor in government service before marrying in 1956. He returned to Alor Setar the following year to set up his own practice. The success of his practice, as the only Malay doctor in the town, allowed him to build a large house, invest in various businesses and, pointedly, employ a chauffeur to drive his Pontiac Catalina.[12][13] He and Siti Hasmah had their first child, Marina, in 1957, before conceiving three others and adopting three more over the following 28 years.[14]