Pathaney Khanਪਠਾਣੇ ਖ਼ਾਂ

Pathaney Khan (1926 to 9 March 2000), born Ghulam Mohammad, was a folk singer from Kot Addu in southern Punjab, Pakistan, famed across the country for his singing of kafis, the Sufi verse form set to music. Drawing mainly on Khwaja Ghulam Farid, Bulleh Shah, Shah Hussain and Pir Meher Ali Shah, he gave the kafi a slow, searching voice that listeners in the Saraiki belt had known for years before radio and television carried it to the rest of Pakistan.

Early life in Basti Tambu Wali

He was born in 1926 in Basti Tambu Wali, a small village in the Thal desert a few miles from Kot Addu, then a tehsil of Muzaffargarh district in British Punjab. His father was Khameesa Khan. Accounts of his childhood agree that he was closest to his mother, who tried to keep him in school, and that his nature pulled him the other way: like his father, he wandered, thought and sang. He left his schooling after the seventh class.

The family lived modestly. His mother baked bread for the village, and the young singer collected firewood to help her earn a living. He began with the kafis of Khwaja Ghulam Farid, the Sufi poet of Mithankot, whose verse in Saraiki speaks of the desert, the Rohi, and longing for the beloved. Most short profiles name Baba Mir Khan as his first teacher in folk singing. Dr Manzur Ejaz, the writer and scholar who knew him well in Lahore, remembered instead a local musician named Amir Khan, linked to the family of the classical singer Ustad Ashiq Ali Khan. The accounts differ on the name, so both are recorded here rather than choosing one in silence.

He took up singing in earnest as a profession after his mother's death. By then the pattern of his life was set: a singer with no formal classical training, formed at village gatherings and melas, who could hold listeners for hours at a stretch.

How did Ghulam Mohammad become Pathaney Khan?

The name came in childhood, and the story is told the same way in most accounts. When the boy was small, his father married again, and his mother left her husband, taking her son to her father's home in Kot Addu. There the child fell seriously ill. His mother took him to the house of a Syed, a spiritual guide, whose wife looked after them and advised that the boy's name be changed, saying Ghulam Mohammad was spiritually too heavy for him. A daughter of the house remarked that the boy looked like a Pathana. In that region the word carries the sense of love and valour, and from that day he was known as Pathaney, later written Pathaney Khan and also Pathanay Khan. His mother believed the new name saved his life.

Radio Pakistan Multan and the road to fame

For roughly two decades he sang mostly within the Saraiki belt, little known outside it. Local accounts of Kot Addu record that when Radio Pakistan Multan was inaugurated on 21 November 1970, its first station director, Shamsuddin Butt, brought him to the new studio and asked him to sing Khwaja Farid's kafi Meda Ishq Vee Toon. Radio Multan made him a household name across southern Punjab, and Dawn's obituary, published the day after his death, noted that he had rendered Khwaja Ghulam Farid's poetry on radio and television for the last 26 years of his life.

Lahore came next. Collectors and writers there, among them the farmer and rare music collector Mian Aslam Ranjha and the circle around the Punjabi journal Rut Lekha, heard in his voice something they had not heard before. Through Mushtaq Sufi's programmes on Pakistan Television his fame spread across the country. In 1976, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto invited him to Islamabad for a private performance. Profiles retell that Bhutto, moved by his singing, asked him three times to name a wish, and that each time the singer answered only that the prime minister should take care of the poor.

What is Pathaney Khan best known for?

He is best known for the kafi, and above all for the kafis of Khwaja Ghulam Farid. A kafi is a short Sufi poem built for singing, and his gift was interpretation: the same poem sung by others as a light folk song or a decorated classical piece became, in his voice, a meditation. Comparing versions of Farid's Peelu Pakian, writers note that his rendering gives the words a deeper, almost cosmic meaning. Shaukat Ali, himself a folk icon, said on Pathaney Khan's death anniversary in 2016 that he gave a new dimension to folk music in Pakistan through his own style of singing kafis and Sufi kalaam.

His best loved recordings include Meda Ishq Vee Toon, Peelu Pakian, Jindari Lutti, Kia Haal Sunawan Dil Da, Ghoom Charakhreya and Cheena Een Chhaneeda Yaar, drawn from Farid, Shah Hussain and Bulleh Shah. His interaction with Lahore's Shah Hussain circle also widened his repertoire toward the poets of central Punjab. Albums issued in his lifetime include Main Vee Jana Jhok Ranjhan and Mera Ishq Vi Toon, both in 1984, and a Kafis collection in 1999. Writers who heard him live add a detail the commercial recordings hide: many thought him at his finest unaccompanied except by a harmonium, singing the same kafi in different ragas without ever naming or boasting about the change.

Honours and later life

In 1979 the President of Pakistan awarded him the Pride of Performance, the country's leading civil honour for the arts, in recognition of his singing. Profiles also report many regional awards from the Saraiki belt, though the totals given for them vary from one account to another, so no single number is stated here.

He stayed rooted in Kot Addu throughout his fame, a singer of the Thal who returned to the desert town after every radio session, television appearance and concert. His reverence for Khwaja Ghulam Farid was complete: contemporaries describe Farid as his master and the source of his spiritual strength, and his clear, carefully punctuated delivery meant that even listeners who did not speak Saraiki could follow the words.

Death and legacy

Pathaney Khan died after a long illness at Kot Addu on 9 March 2000, aged 74. His funeral drew poets, writers, lawyers, teachers and district officials, and he was buried in his native graveyard at Kot Addu. Dawn's obituary recorded that his family had struggled during his illness, a reminder that national fame had not made him wealthy.

His legacy is the place he gave the kafi in Pakistan's recorded music. Singers and listeners in southern Punjab still call him the flower of the Rohi, the desert bloom of Khwaja Farid's own poetry. Every year on 9 March his death anniversary is marked in Pakistan with tributes on radio, television and social media, and his recordings of Farid, Bulleh Shah and Shah Hussain continue to introduce new listeners to Sufi poetry in Saraiki and Punjabi.