More than a mystic

The old man at Ujan Dhol kept his ektara close, much like other men keep a walking stick or a long-standing grudge. Visitors who journeyed looking for spiritual songs about divine love and transcendental devotion usually found precisely what they anticipated. 

Shah Abdul Karim offered those tunes willingly, delivered in the plain, unvarnished diction of a cultivator who spent seven decades watching the Kalni river swell and recede. Yet few listeners noticed that tucked within the same body of work was a man keeping a precise tally of how the powerful had systematically cheated his village, decade after decade, regardless of whichever flag happened to fly above it.

There is a line from his long narrative song Bhatir Chithi—‘Letter from the Lowlands’—that poses a question with no answer: if the exploiter's own structure of rule stays standing, what possible difference does it make which good man you send to parliament? This is hardly a mystic's line. It is the thought of someone who watched successive governments come and go, observing that the moneylender's ledger and the landlord's fence somehow remained exactly where they were.

Karim composed Bhatir Chithi as an old man surveying roughly fifty years of life in the haor basin of Sunamganj. Its opening passages almost pass for pastoral nostalgia: young boys herding cattle, communal boat races along the Kalni, Hindu and Muslim households exchanging festival sweets without ceremony. 

Then, without formally announcing the shift, the poem transforms into an uncompromising ledger of dispossession. Wetlands that villagers once fished freely are auctioned off as private leases to men with capital. Landless labourers walk for days to earn mere fractions of a taka. Moneylenders who once used a pen to strip a poor man of his last plot, Karim writes, discovered that muscle worked much faster. 

He counts the price of firewood, a cow, and a mound of rice like a seasoned accountant. For his audience, that calculation was the core of politics.

Karim noted quite bluntly that he was born a protester. It was not a late political awakening, but an instinct present from the beginning inside a poor cultivator's household in Dhalasrom. Baul philosophy is usually remembered in Bangladesh for mysticism: riddles about the physical body as a vessel for the divine, songs of longing, and a refusal of religious orthodoxy. 

Karim absorbed that world from teachers like Baul Rashid Uddin and Shah Ibrahim Mastan Baksh. Yet he also grew up in Sylhet's haor country during the Tebhaga agitation, when sharecroppers across Bengal demanded two-thirds of the harvest and peasant organisations confronted landlords with unprecedented confidence.

He was never a party member. He did not need to be. The Gono Sangeet he compiled from the 1950s onwards—songs of the masses, distinct from devotional work—often performed the duties of a political pamphlet.

The crucial difference was that these songs travelled by boat and voice rather than print, surviving because people actually wanted to sing them. Some early pieces were startlingly topical. 

One mocked the coalition ministries of the 1954 election season by name, counting seven years of Muslim League rule and the fresh disappointments surrounding the United Front that replaced it. Soup kitchens and relief rice, the song dryly observed, had become permanent fixtures rather than emergency measures. Karim was composing sharp political satire in couplet form while the surrounding cultural establishment continued singing traditional tales of Radha and Krishna.

By the time Bhatir Chithi reaches its central argument, Karim has already guided his listener through the British departure, the disappearance of visible zamindars, Pakistani rule, and Bangladeshi independence. At every historic turn, he notices the same reality: the peasant and the labourer remain static. 

The structural frame built by the exploiter exists to extract wealth regardless of who occupies it. Changing the managers inside the machinery is not the same as changing the machinery itself.

Karim went beyond mere complaint. If the working poor were to live differently, he argued, that frame had to be broken rather than patched up. Peasant, labourer, and the propertyless needed to stand together against it.

At one point he adopted sarbahara, the Bengali word borrowed from Marxist vocabulary for the dispossessed proletariat. Lines later, he offered a quiet warning to those who profited: one day, the people themselves will sit in judgment.

None of this made Karim a party cadre. He remained a farmer to the end, suspicious of easy slogans, caring more about whether local sluice gates functioned than which party controlled the district. That is precisely why his observations endure. Bangladesh remembers Shah Abdul Karim mostly for Bondhe Maya Lagaise and the ache of songs about absent boatmen. 

That memory is not wrong, merely incomplete. It leaves out the farmer who recorded how power repeatedly changed its uniforms while the poor remained poor...the Baul who could write of the divine beloved in one breath, and a landlord's fence in the next.

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Mahmud Newaz Joy is a freelance feature writer and political analyst