<p>During a famine, a stingy village headman fears people showing up at his house to seek alms. He asks his wife to tell them that he had died and send them away. This unusual episode appears in a song collected in rural Karnataka somewhere by the folklorist and poet, SK Kareem Khan.</p>.<p>Born in Sakleshpur in 1910, Kareem Khan was the sixth among nine siblings. His father, Abdul Rehman Khan, was a Sunni Pathan from Kabul who had fought against the British in the Second Anglo-Afghan War. Following a family quarrel, he moved to Sakleshpur and made a living as a Unani practitioner and a cloth trader. He married Zebunnisa, a girl from a Sunni Arab family settled in Virajpet, Coorg. Since they were the lone Muslim family in Sakleshpur at that time, Kareem Khan grew up amidst children from various communities. He and his siblings were sent to the local Kannada medium school. The pressure to leave school was high after his father’s death, but his eldest brother ensured he stayed on in school, for which he remained grateful.</p>.<p>Achangi Narayana Shastri, one of his teachers at school who was a scholar of the puranas and Hindu philosophical traditions, initiated the studious Kareem Khan into Indian philosophy and mythology and classical Kannada literature. Losing their Sakleshpur home during a river flood, his family moved to Hassan, where he completed his eighth standard in school. His biographers speculate that his great love for folk songs might have strengthened in Hassan, a region rich in folklore. Traders of brass utensils made in Sravanabelagola, who would camp with their carts at night in the field opposite his house, would cook and sing songs and dance late into the night. The young Kareem Khan was enthralled by this experience.</p>.<p>Kareem Khan was drawn to the Indian freedom movement during high school. It moved him when his teacher read out in class the news about the freedom struggle. His school education stopped after his eighth grade due to financial difficulty at home. He taught in a school briefly before devoting himself to helping his family in the cloth trade.</p>.<p>After seeing Gandhi during his visit to Bangalore in 1936, he started wearing khadi and a Gandhi cap, a habit that he stayed with till the end of his life in 2006. He threw himself into the freedom struggle and composed songs to mobilise support in rural areas. He was jailed several times for being part of the freedom movement. After independence, he was involved in the state’s unification movement.</p>.<p>In the 1950s, Kareem Khan published two major anthologies of folk songs, the fruit of his extensive foot journeys through villages: Janapada Geete Part 1 (1955) and Part 2 (1959). He published two more folk song anthologies in later decades. His first publications, however, were Kannada translations of short stories, Neevara (1949) and Nihara (1943), and a novel, Balidaani Hussain (1955). Besides these, his publications include three novels, 20 plays, and over a dozen volumes of poetry and devotional songs.</p>.<p>Another fascinating side of Kareem Khan’s writerly corpus: the film writings. When earning a living became difficult, he moved to Chennai in 1956 to work in the Kannada film industry, which was then based there. He wrote film scripts and screenplays for over a dozen films, including the hit Swarna Gauri (1962). He wrote over 250 film songs in his lifetime.</p>.<p>Unscrupulous individuals in the film and publishing worlds appear to have often taken advantage of the not-so-worldly minded Kareem Khan, who lived a tough life for the most part. After moving back to Bangalore, he lived in a small room in Dwaraka Hotel in Basavanagudi for nearly 30 years. He never married.</p>.<p>Feted by the state government and numerous organisations in the closing decades of his life, the richly versatile Kareem Khan, however, remains more or less a non-presence in the popular imagination. The fragmentary accounts of his life in two biographies – Nadoja Dr S K Kareem Khan (2010) by Dr Prakash Bommanna Nayak and Kannada Santa S K Kareem Khan (2013) by Prof D Lingaiah – point to the need for a fuller story of a man remembered on his tombstone simply as “Freedom Fighter and Kannada Poet.”</p>.<p><em>The writer is Vidyashilp Professor looks for new ways of looking.</em></p>
<p>During a famine, a stingy village headman fears people showing up at his house to seek alms. He asks his wife to tell them that he had died and send them away. This unusual episode appears in a song collected in rural Karnataka somewhere by the folklorist and poet, SK Kareem Khan.</p>.<p>Born in Sakleshpur in 1910, Kareem Khan was the sixth among nine siblings. His father, Abdul Rehman Khan, was a Sunni Pathan from Kabul who had fought against the British in the Second Anglo-Afghan War. Following a family quarrel, he moved to Sakleshpur and made a living as a Unani practitioner and a cloth trader. He married Zebunnisa, a girl from a Sunni Arab family settled in Virajpet, Coorg. Since they were the lone Muslim family in Sakleshpur at that time, Kareem Khan grew up amidst children from various communities. He and his siblings were sent to the local Kannada medium school. The pressure to leave school was high after his father’s death, but his eldest brother ensured he stayed on in school, for which he remained grateful.</p>.<p>Achangi Narayana Shastri, one of his teachers at school who was a scholar of the puranas and Hindu philosophical traditions, initiated the studious Kareem Khan into Indian philosophy and mythology and classical Kannada literature. Losing their Sakleshpur home during a river flood, his family moved to Hassan, where he completed his eighth standard in school. His biographers speculate that his great love for folk songs might have strengthened in Hassan, a region rich in folklore. Traders of brass utensils made in Sravanabelagola, who would camp with their carts at night in the field opposite his house, would cook and sing songs and dance late into the night. The young Kareem Khan was enthralled by this experience.</p>.<p>Kareem Khan was drawn to the Indian freedom movement during high school. It moved him when his teacher read out in class the news about the freedom struggle. His school education stopped after his eighth grade due to financial difficulty at home. He taught in a school briefly before devoting himself to helping his family in the cloth trade.</p>.<p>After seeing Gandhi during his visit to Bangalore in 1936, he started wearing khadi and a Gandhi cap, a habit that he stayed with till the end of his life in 2006. He threw himself into the freedom struggle and composed songs to mobilise support in rural areas. He was jailed several times for being part of the freedom movement. After independence, he was involved in the state’s unification movement.</p>.<p>In the 1950s, Kareem Khan published two major anthologies of folk songs, the fruit of his extensive foot journeys through villages: Janapada Geete Part 1 (1955) and Part 2 (1959). He published two more folk song anthologies in later decades. His first publications, however, were Kannada translations of short stories, Neevara (1949) and Nihara (1943), and a novel, Balidaani Hussain (1955). Besides these, his publications include three novels, 20 plays, and over a dozen volumes of poetry and devotional songs.</p>.<p>Another fascinating side of Kareem Khan’s writerly corpus: the film writings. When earning a living became difficult, he moved to Chennai in 1956 to work in the Kannada film industry, which was then based there. He wrote film scripts and screenplays for over a dozen films, including the hit Swarna Gauri (1962). He wrote over 250 film songs in his lifetime.</p>.<p>Unscrupulous individuals in the film and publishing worlds appear to have often taken advantage of the not-so-worldly minded Kareem Khan, who lived a tough life for the most part. After moving back to Bangalore, he lived in a small room in Dwaraka Hotel in Basavanagudi for nearly 30 years. He never married.</p>.<p>Feted by the state government and numerous organisations in the closing decades of his life, the richly versatile Kareem Khan, however, remains more or less a non-presence in the popular imagination. The fragmentary accounts of his life in two biographies – Nadoja Dr S K Kareem Khan (2010) by Dr Prakash Bommanna Nayak and Kannada Santa S K Kareem Khan (2013) by Prof D Lingaiah – point to the need for a fuller story of a man remembered on his tombstone simply as “Freedom Fighter and Kannada Poet.”</p>.<p><em>The writer is Vidyashilp Professor looks for new ways of looking.</em></p>
