Mary Margaret Craske was born on 26 November 1892 in Suffolk, England, the daughter of Edmund George Craske and Hannah Bishop. She began dancing as a girl, danced with Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, and studied with the great ballet master Enrico Cecchetti, who certified her to carry on his teaching tradition. When an injury ended her performing career she turned to teaching, and with the South African dancer Mabel Ryan she ran a ballet school in London at 26 West Street. With the critic Cyril Beaumont she wrote The Theory and Practice of Allegro in Classical Ballet, a classic text on the Cecchetti method.
Between 1929 and 1931 her father, her mother and the man she loved all died. At Easter 1931 she went to Meredith Starr's retreat at East Challacombe in Devonshire, saw Meher Baba's picture on the wall, and learned of him. Five months later, in September 1931, she was at the Davys' house in Kensington when Baba arrived on his first visit to the West, and it was she who opened the front door to him. Called up to his room, she looked deeply into his eyes, and later wrote that from that moment there was never a moment's doubt that he was "the embodiment of Love and Life." In Venice in 1932 Baba gave her the Eastern name Zuleka.
Margaret was in the first group of Westerners to visit Baba in India in April 1933, and in December 1936 she sailed to India again with Kitty Davy and Delia DeLeon. At Nasik she choreographed spiritual dances for a film Baba planned, taught dance to Rano and Delia, and showed Baba her work on his weekly visits; she remarked that he always pointed out errors only "an artist perfect in his art would know." Baba had told her and Delia to come to India if war broke out. In 1939 she obtained permission to leave England as guardian to the young Falu Irani, and on 1 November 1939 she arrived in Bangalore and began living with Baba and the women at the Links.
For the next seven years Margaret lived in Baba's women's ashram in India. Baba proposed that she open a dance school in Bangalore, had her teach the women martial arts and swimming, and in 1943 and 1944 kept her among the small group of women with him at Pimpalgaon (later Meherazad), together with Mehera, Mani, Meheru and Walu. On 1 May 1946 Baba himself escorted her to Delhi; at the station he told her, "Take my love to the West." Before she left he spelled out on his board, "You must go; I have made you my link in America."
In the autumn of 1946 she became ballet mistress of Ballet Theatre (now American Ballet Theatre) in New York, and later taught at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School, the Juilliard School and Manhattan Festival Ballet. Many of her dance students came to Baba, and during his visits to America in 1952, 1956 and 1958 they met him; at the Meher Spiritual Center in 1958, eleven of her young dancers performed for him in the Barn. She attended the East-West Gathering in Poona in 1962, served on the board of the Meher Spiritual Center, and wrote The Dance of Love (1980) and Still Dancing with Love about her life with Baba.
In her last years Margaret retired from teaching and lived at the Meher Spiritual Center in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. She died at Grand Strand Hospital in Myrtle Beach on 18 February 1990, at the age of 97. Her ashes were brought to the women's cemetery at Meherabad and interred beside Elizabeth Patterson, under an inscription that reads "Baba's Dancer."
