Karamat was born in Odia Bazar, Cuttack, on 23 September 1936, to Rahamat Ali Rahmat (1891–1963) and Wazeerun Nisa.
Karamat's thesis on probability theory in mathematics was entitled "Some Properties of Random Equations", and he received his Ph.D. on 13 November 1982.
[8][16] American mathematician Albert Turner Bharucha-Reid included Karamat's research formulas from his thesis in his own book, Random Polynomials.
[22] Karamat married Zubaida Ali, the second daughter of Abdur Rafiq Khan of Talpatak,[17][23] Jagatsinghpur district,[24] on 23 May 1959.
[26][27][28] Karamat learned Arabic prosody from Manzar Hasan Desnavi at Ravenshaw College,[29][10] and Mazhar Imam was his advisor for Urdu prose literature in Cuttack.
[30][31][33] In June 1965[34] (a year before the publication of Shabkhoon), he published the bi-monthly magazine Shakhsar in Cuttack; it was edited by Amjad Najmi.
[30][35] Karamat presented Urdu criticism in a novel, rational way;[36][37][38] his critical-essay collections include Izāfi Tabqīd (1977) and Naye Tanqīdi Masāʼil Aur Imkānāt (2009).
[1] According to Unwan Chishti, Karamat's poetry has the colour and harmony of "contemporary awareness", which he has expressed by making the development of science and technology a part of consciousness.
[40] Gopi Chand Narang said that he has long been a believer in and admirer of Karamat's poetry, agreeing with Firaq Gorakhpuri that his writings compel reflection.
[25][50][51][52] Azizur Rehman Aziz received his doctoral degree from Ranchi University, supervised by Wahab Ashrafi.
[53] In 1990, A. Russell translated Karamat's Urdu poems into English in The Story of the Way and Other Poems[54][55][56][57] with Jayant Mahapatra, Laxmi Narayan Mahapatra, Rajinder Singh Verma, Prafulla Kumar Mohanty, Sailendra Narayan Tripathy, P. Asit Kumar, Kamal Masoompuri, Zohra Jabeen, and M. A. Ahad.