Pakistan's policy-makers may have ignored Khan's calls for simplicity, renunciation and self-reliance, but his work has made a difference in the lives of the countless many in Bangladesh and Pakistan and inspired development scholars both in the Subcontinent and the West. (An interview with Akhtar Hameed Khan and a companion article by Tarik Ali Khan on him and his work in Orangi appeared in the August 1998 issue of Himal.)
"Khan Sahib", as he was known, was born to a Pathan family from Agra in 1914. After receiving an MA from Agra University in 1934, he joined the Indian Civil Service and served as a probationer at Cambridge University. However he soon became disillusioned with life as a colonial civil servant. He had participated in the central planning that contributed to the 1943 Bengal famine and the decay of the British Empire was as apparent to him as the growing poverty of the Subcontinent. He chose to make a genuine renunciation and explore the life of the common man. He resigned from the ICS in 1945 and began to work as a locksmith.
Renunciation was an important theme in his life. Greatly influenced in his early life by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, the 19th-century reformer who founded the Aligarh Muslim University and encouraged the Muslim shurfa (middle class) to synthesise Western knowledge and Islamic thought, Khan's later influences included Tolstoy, the Sufi mystics and the Buddha. He liked to refer to himself as a "Muslim Buddhist". "Why did Buddha give up his princehood to become a wandering mendicant?" he once mused. "Because the way to discover the meaning of life is through controlling your instincts, controlling greed, hatred and delusion."
After two years of locksmithery, he taught at the Jamia Millia University in Delhi, before migrating to East Pakistan in 1950 where he was appointed principal of Comilla College. He later became the director of US-sponsored village agricultural and industrial development (V-AID) projects. He spent a year at Michigan state University and returned as the training diector of the Pakistan Academy for Rural Development in Comilla.