Lutfullah Khan The Sound Magician

Lutfullah Khan was such a multi-dimensional, rare, wonderful and valuable person that one really finds it hard to find appropriate words for describing his amazing personality.

I had my first meeting with him almost thirty-five years ago, through the courtesy of the late Mushfiq Khuaja, who told me that Lutfullah Khan was an extremely nice and decent fellow, who was very fond of recording the poetry and writings of poets and writers in their own voices. For this purpose, he had a rare and worth seeing audio library of his own. I was told that in this connection, he would soon contact me and Ataul-Haq Qasmi who was in Karachi in those days, to take part in some poetry recitation contest. Hearing such warm words of appreciation from a person like Mushfiq Khuaja (who had a keen eye for judging the real worth of a person) was quite sufficient to convince me that Lutfullah Khan must be an extraordinary fellow. However, during my personal meeting with him, when he humbly told me about his work, I realized that he possessed all those qualities which others had pointed out to me. Almost three decades ago, I wrote an article with the title ‘The sound magician’ about him in the popular Urdu newspaper of that time ‘Imroz.’ Even at that time, the duration of the audio recordings in his sound collection was thirty-four thousand hours. These recordings were related to religion, music, speeches, sermons, poetry and literature. He belonged to that small but exceptional group of people, who are known as ‘Collectors’ and who are always hectically busy in search of the things pertaining to their own favourite field, no matter from wherever they are found and whatever they have to do to find them. They are always ready to sacrifice their time, wealth and energies in order to get their required material.

It was the time when computer technology had not yet become a part of our life and yet, Lutfullah Khan had prepared a complete record of the recordings preserved in his audio library. Full details of each and every second of the thirty-four thousand hours of recordings had been catalogued in large volumes. It is quite interesting to note that without the help of computers, in less than a minute’s time, Lutfullah Khan could provide you the required item out of the thousands of cassettes kept in his library. He used to talk to all the people irrespective of age, in such a loving, friendly and humble manner, that everyone loved to talk to him and hear him talking.

Once, several years ago, when he came to Lahore, he also came to see me at my home, but afterwards, on account of his growing age and increasing pre-occupations, he spent much of his time in Karachi. Almost 15 years ago, he started living in the neighbourhood of my friend Muhammad Ashraf Shahin and Brother Mushtaq Ahmad Yusufi in Defence. But even this relatively much bigger house seemed unable to accommodate his ever increasing and highly valuable treasure, which is hard to be described in words. Its vastness can be imagined from the fact that during the past 60 years, whenever media officials and researchers were in search of some rare or worth mentioning voice, they always contacted Lutfullah Khan, and in 99 per cent such cases, he provided them with their required material.

Lutfullah Khan was passionately and crazily devoted to his work. He had in his library, the audio recording of the recitation of the Holy Quran by all the notable Qaris of the Muslim world, in line with their typical accents and standards. He had such a huge collection of the music of all the leading musicians and singers that even the most enthusiastic music lovers regarded him as their Guru. Once, he told me that after the strenuous labour of 26 years, he had, at last, been able to record all the poetry of Faiz Ahmad Faiz in his own voice. Those who are fully aware of Faiz’s particular temperament and bent of mind are fully aware of the fact that Lutfullah Khan had done something which was apparently quite impossible.

During the early years of his life, he himself learnt the art of music and Ragas and continued to sing for a long time. Later on, he turned to recording, photography and pictures and set the highest standards of excellence in all these fields, by dint of his extraordinary genius and passion. On a number of occasions, like many of his friends and admirers, I expressed to him my desire that his unique and invaluable treasure should be preserved at the national level as a cultural heritage. I further suggested to him that in case, he did not like to trust the government and politicians, a trust consisting of some resourceful lovers of art and literature should be formed to properly preserve this treasure in the form of a cultural museum. Lutfullah Khan did not agree to this proposal.

A few months ago, brother Ahmad Shah was able to prevail upon Lutfullah Khan along with some other very senior figures, to attend a function organized by the Karachi Arts Council. It was there that I had my last meeting with Lutfullah Khan and Zahida Bhabi. She was on a wheel chair and looked very weak, but there was no change in his graceful personality and impressive smiles. On that day, I found that he was, at last, willing to transfer his treasure to some government or non-governmental organization, because practically, he was no longer in a position to increase its bulk or look after it properly. Lutfullah Khan is not among us today, but by effectively preserving his marvelous and memorable treasure, we can prove ourselves to be a living nation, having great love for knowledge, art and literature. Lutfullah Khan was surely one of those people whose delightful company inspires us to love life.