Renowned scholar Kaimkhani dies

Rest in Peace, Khursheed sahib. I had the privilege of meeting you years ago, on your last trip to India in the late 1990's, when you also visited your ancestral village in Sikar, Rajasthan. We met in my friend Purushottam's home in the JNU campus.  In our long conversation, we learnt about how you felt 'an exile' outside your old home, how your Hindu neighbours had protected your family house for decades, and how you asked them to use it for a school or some other means of social welfare. We learned about your all-consuming interest in the lives of the nomadic, tribal and Hindu communities of Sindh, and your promotion of the Hindi Prem Sabha.  You always fought to uphold the highest values of the human spirit. God be with you sir - Dilip

Renowned nomad anthropologist and researcher Khursheed Kaimkhani died at a Karachi hospital on Wednesday after a long illness. He was 80. His body was taken to Tando Allahyar, his hometown, where he will be laid to rest on Thursday. He left two sons, a daughter, a widow and thousands of admirers among the gypsy and scheduled caste communities and fans in the fields of literature, history and anthropology to mourn his death.

Mr Kaimkhani, well known for his contributions to anthropology, history and literature of gypsies, scheduled castes and other nomad tribes, served in the army for 15 years before turning to the field of research.

Born to a soldierly family in 1933 in a small village in Rajasthan, India, Mr Khursheed acquired primary education at the Madhu Singh primary school in Seker (Rajasthan) and later in Municipal School Tando Allahyar when his family moved to Tando Allahyar after partition. Following family traditions, Mr Kaimkhani joined the army after matric from Noor Mohammed High School, Hyderabad, and received his commission at the Military Academy, Kakul, but he always felt he was not cut out for soldiering. When the army decided to launch a military operation in what was then East Pakistan in the 1970s he called it quits and resigned as senior major, risking his pension and other fringe benefits which were withheld for voicing dissent.

Once free of the burden of military life, he plunged into his only loves of life: travel and research. His first column was published in the Daily Star on Rama Pir, a saint of Hindu scheduled castes. Mr Kaimkhani had not received any formal education in anthropology or sociology but his keen interest in the fields earned him name as an established anthropologist. He contributed immensely to anthropology, history and literature of gypsies, scheduled castes and other nomad tribes and undertook journeys to many countries to get firsthand knowledge about their life, culture and anthropology.

In recognition of his work, Mr Kaimkhani was given an award by the Sindh Graduates Association, an organisation of social workers and educated people of Sindh. Faiz Mohammad Sheedi, a well-known leader of the Sheedis, was among his best friends. Mr Kaimkhani authored four books “Sipyaan aur Pathar”, “Bhatkti Nasleen”, “Sapnon ka Des” and “Umeedoon ki Fasal” and wrote hundreds of columns and articles in English-, Urdu- and Sindhi-language newspapers.

He founded a small library for peasants in his village near Tando Allahyar and set up a school for Jogis (snake charmers) in Tando Allahyar town. He gave away three acres of his land to scheduled castes Kolhis and Bheels. Mr Kaimkhani attended a number of international conferences on indigenous people in the US and France.

He was a bitter great critic of feudal lords and capitalists. In his autobiography he wrote: “I saw capitalists and feudals betraying people in the name of popular slogans. And also institutions responsible for law and order engaged in violating law and constitution.”

http://dawn.com/2013/01/10/renowned-scholar-kaimkhani-dies/

Also see: Khurshid Chacha, I Won’t Ever Forget You - by Yoginder Sikand

...the little that I saw of Khurshid indicated a man who lived pretty much as he preached. He had a modest home in Tando Allah Yar, not far from the Sindhi town of Hyderabad, where I visited him some years ago. His little farm, which he had inherited from his father, he had given to Balu, a Hindu Dalit and childhood friend, to manage. Over a dozen other impoverished Dalit families lived there, too, but they worked on other people’s lands. Khurshid had generously permitted them to live on his farm because elsewhere they may not have been safe and could easily have been targeted by dacoits or by dreaded landlords, whose word was law in interior Sindh. Khurshid and the Dalits on the farm were one large family, as was evident from the way they behaved with each other—joking and laughing and eating with each other and sitting together at night and singing songs of universal love by Kabir, Shah Abdul Latif and Mira Bai: quite unthinkable behavior for any ‘respectable’ Pakistani (or, for that matter, Indian) farm-owner.

One of the most moving memories that I have of Khurshid—and this rushes to my mind as I write these lines—was when we went out to the Dalit slum just beyond Tando Allah Yar. As we entered the locality of the Jogis—’low’ caste Hindu snake-charmers—a train of little children, undernourished and dressed in miserable rags, rushed out to greet him. He enveloped them in a giant hug. Then, he introduced me to his friends, pathetically impoverished Jogi men and women, with whom he spent much of his time. He showed me around the little Shiva temple at the corner of the locality. Some of the bells and statues inside he had brought back from his frequent trips to India.

He wasn’t at all, as far as I know, a believer in god—in any god for that matter—but he did see something akin to divinity in the children of his Dalit friends—the poorest of Pakistan’s desperately poor. ‘Look at them,’ I remember him saying to me, ‘What beautiful smiles! What innocent eyes! What poor souls, un-corrupted by hatred in the name of religion! How I wish I could kiss their feet.’..