In a very significant sense, Abdul Karim pioneered what was essentially a movement, his own, for a revival of Bengali literary richness. He was, from such a perspective, not a creator of literature but its devotee. The arduous efforts he put into his programme of locating and collecting the puthi songs of Bengal were patently the hallmarks of a man to whom literature, or its discovery, was a defining affair. To be sure, puthi literature, a narrative form of tradition (or you might call it Bengal's very own oral tradition coming down to the generations across the years), had been part of the ambience in these parts before Karim's arrival on the scene. Bengali writers, largely belonging to the Hindu community, had left a voluminous range of work on puthi literature that only added to the diversity of literature in Bengal. So what was different about Abdul Karim Shahityabisharod's contribution to the genre, or its rediscovery? In essence, he accomplished two feats here. The first was to serve notice that even within the Bengali Muslim community, a body of individuals not particularly noted for their literary inclinations at the time, there were indeed people who did take interest in encounters of the literary kind. And the second was the clear broadening of the canvas that Abdul Karim undertook in his approach to puthi studies. It was he who let people in on the idea that puthi literature was not a matter for the upper or middle classes to handle; it was to be spotted in the simplicity of rural life as well. In a manner of speaking, therefore, Abdul Karim journeyed far and wide through Bengal, pored over innumerable works and much history, in his unique enterprise of unearthing hidden or lost cultural heritage.

And the amazing part of the Abdul Karim Shahityabisharod story is that he did it all alone. Where the early observers of puthi literature undertook their work on the strength of external financial largesse, Karim had only himself to fall back on for resources with which to pursue his interest. He went to Muslim homes to learn about old tales that might have lain there; and then he made his way to Hindu families, to learn from them the lessons they had imbibed within their own social framework. The result was a rewarding crop of puthi culture people did not know ever existed. Abdul Karim, of course, was not surprised. He had always had that gut feeling that there were puthi treasures hidden or overshadowed in the way traditions are generally locked away until someone comes up to crack the doors open a little, to let the sunlight filter in on bygone grandeur. In Gyanshagor and Gourango Sanyas, it is the sunlight that speaks.

A remarkable quality in Abdul Karim Shahityabisharod was the careful way in which he bucked the political trends of the times he inhabited. Even as his fellow Muslim writers went about looking for an Islamic imagery to base their thoughts upon, Karim stayed honest to the calling of literature, literature as it was meant to be, all his life. Not for him the pointless craving for a literature Muslims could relate to. Karim and Kazi Nazrul Islam were perhaps the first Bengali Muslims, from the point of view of literature, to aver, in so many words, that religion was not equipped to bear the weight of true, hardbone literature. In an era when sections of Muslims were cheerfully going overboard in their determination to rediscover themselves as born-again followers of the Islamic faith, Abdul Karim Shahityabisharod moved not at all from the secular concept of life. It was particularly in the 1940s that a group of Bengalis with pretensions to Muslim literature arose, their overriding objective being an argument for the East Pakistani literature... that was on the way. When Syed Ali Ahsan and Syed Sajjad Hossain were raucously ecstatic upon 'discovering' the Muslim literature that would underpin East Pakistani literature... Abdul Karim must have regarded such efforts as unadulterated heresy. Syed Sajjad Hussain's attempt to discover in Muslim Bengali literature shades of an earlier tradition, in Europe and that of the Celts, must have appeared risible to Shahityabisharod. Literature was not to be segmented into communal compartments. To factionalise it was to kill it, or force it into a stunted condition.

Today, fifty three years after his death -- the life went out of him even as he was busy traversing the landscape of literary tradition, literally -- Abdul Karim Shahityabisharod remains one of the more significant points of reference for Bengalis. He was a clerk whose interest was, as ever, the pursuit of literature. He was a man with an ego of the sort which subsists in men not unduly drawn to the worldly. He once told a friend he was leaving his uncle to handle the banalities which come with keeping worldly property while he moved on to explore the expanding and deepening spaces of the mind. The poet Nabinchandra Sen had once opened the doors for him. He simply stepped across the threshold, to leave his own footprints along the dusty paths.

Syed Badrul Ahsan writes poetry and fiction and earns a living as a journalist.