Introduction: Arabic as a South Asian Language

In recent decades, the ascent of the “Persianate world” paradigm has prompted a major revival in the study of Persian sources in and on South Asia, while at the same time building on Marshall Hodgson's capacious original conception of the Persianate as being more than Persian per se by including “more local languages of high culture that … depended upon Persian wholly or in part for their prime literary inspiration.”¹ While this has been an extraordinarily productive cycle of scholarship, it has also coincided and perhaps contributed to the longstanding occlusion of South Asia's Arabic tradition. A single bibliographical citation may serve to illustrate the stark contrast to the Persianate publishing boom: the last English-language book-length survey of “the contribution of India to Arabic” was completed as long ago as 1929.²

Yet in the near century since then, Arabic has not disappeared from what in 1947 became India and Pakistan (and, after 1971, Bangladesh).³ For in the postcolonial period, the presence of Arabic has expanded and its roles diversified through a blend of Islamizing Pakistani educational policies, Indian labor migration to the Gulf, and Arabic's continued use as a common language by Muslim religious students and scholars across the Middle East and South Asia. This has produced a steady stream of publications in both Arabic and Indian regional languages, such as Urdu, exploring different regional or genre-based dimensions of South Asia's Arabic heritage.⁴

Happily, a new generation of scholars based in Europe and North America is also now studying various aspects of the troika of Arabic in India; Arabic and India; and India in Arabic. Drawing attention to these junior researchers—and to the work of the small number of more senior scholars who have paved the way—this introductory essay makes the historical and historiographical case for the importance of Arabic as an Indian language.

Along with the case-study essays that follow, this roundtable as a whole both builds on and challenges the ascent of “Indo-Persian” and “Persianate world” studies over the past two decades by showing how attention to Persian has helped conceal what ultimately proves to be the more enduring history of South Asian engagement with Arabic.⁵ The collective goal of the contributors is not to prematurely foreclose horizons or ascertain conclusions, but rather to open a range of research possibilities for future scholars. To better enable this goal, the following pages pose a series of basic questions to lay out the many research avenues that remain open alongside pointing to studies that already exist for particular topics. Intended to map the temporal, spatial, social, and operational aspects of Arabic-use, the broad questions posed here address the when, where, who, and how of over a millennium of Arabic-use in South Asia.

When: Temporal Aspects of South Asian Arabic

In his magisterial history of Arabic literature, Carl Brockelmann issued what might appear to be a warning shot for future investigators of South Asian Arabic:

From the very beginning, Islamic culture in India was entirely under Persian influence… Even though individual travelling scholars such as Ibn Battuta and al-Firuzabadi were received with honour at the courts of Muslim India… their influence did not extend far enough to give Arabic literature any real significance compared to Persian. Similarly, relations between the Muslim theologians of India and the cultural centres of South Arabia and Mecca have left almost no evidence. Thus, the contributions of Indian Muslims to Arabic literature remained very limited.⁶

If this seems a disheartening appraisal of prospects for a nascent research field, then it will come as a relief to realize that Brockelmann was writing here about the period before around 1500—which brings us briskly to a primary point about the temporal aspects of South Asian Arabic: far from being an expression of the earliest periods of Indo-Islamic history, the production of Arabic texts in India and broader engagement there with both written and spoken Arabic increased over time as a result of closer interaction with the Ottoman Hijaz, British Egypt, and then the postcolonial Gulf states in turn.⁷

Far from following a simplistic diminishing trajectory of cosmopolitan Arabic to (more or less) cosmopolitan Persian to regional vernaculars to national languages and postcolonial global English, the chronology of Arabic-use across South Asia has pursued a series of more complex and fluctuating trajectories shaped in turn by the spatial and social variables of “where” and “who” discussed below. There is undoubtedly the risk here of confusing the disappearance of early texts through the attrition of time with the greater survival rate of more recent (especially printed rather than manuscript) works. But the broader picture beginning to appear in recent studies is one of early modern Arabic-based networks expanding across the Indian Ocean then being followed by a further expansion of Arabic-learning in colonial India (prompted in part by easier access). This may suggest a broad pattern of increasing South Asian engagement with Arabic over time that accelerated with the contraction of Persian studies from the mid-nineteenth century. Thereafter, building on the reputations of earlier Indian scholars in the Hijaz, from the early twentieth century there emerged a wider diaspora of South Asian authors and teachers in Arabic based in colonial Egypt, as well as in what was by the 1920s Saudi-ruled Arabia. A case in point is the post-Persianate revival of Arabic as a language of South Asian history-writing in the late nineteenth and twentieth century, examined by Mohsin Ali in his essay for this roundtable. This culminated in the Arabic histories written by the North Indian Sayyid Abu'l-Hasan ‘Ali Nadwi (1913–99), who frequently lectured in Mecca and published books in Damascus.⁸

These closer connections emerged in colonial India after the founding of new institutions of Arabic studies, particularly Lucknow's Nadwat al-‘Ulama’ seminary in 1898, which sought to modernize the teaching of Arabic in line with pedagogical trends in Cairo and the late Ottoman Levant.⁹ Such ties of steam and print similarly saw Chinese Muslim reformists establish Beijing's Arabizing Chengda Shifan Xuexiao (Chengda Normal School) and other new schools, whose graduates travelled in turn to Lucknow and Cairo.¹⁰ Even the predominantly Urdu-medium Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh engaged with Egypt's Islamic modernists, also partly through the promotion of Arabic as a Muslim lingua franca by the European orientalists and British officials who helped shape the college's curriculum.¹¹ This transregional linguistic geography not only saw Rashid Rida's stridently religious journal al-Manar (The Lighthouse) find South Asian readers, but also lent an Indian dimension to the Nahda movement, whose epistles of print ecumenism similarly reached India's steam ports and rail-connected libraries inland at a pace that far outstripped medieval and early modern ties.¹² Meanwhile, in developments discussed in Sohaib Baig's contribution to this roundtable, India's own booming print emporia not only saw commercial printers (including the great Hindu entrepreneur Naval Kishore) issue Arabic books for both the domestic and overseas markets, but also saw the establishment of state-patronized Arabic presses such as Hyderabad's Da'irat al-Ma‘arif al-‘Uthmaniyya. So much for South Asia's contribution to the production of Arabic books.

However, these modern publishing developments also reshaped the reception of medieval texts. This suggests that attention to authorial textual production should be set beside the more dynamic processes of reception and tradition as traditio (being “handed down”), as Arabic works from beyond South Asia were imported, copied or printed, and studied there over the centuries—and in turn became the focus of commentarial production, whether in Arabic or regional languages.¹³ With the passing of time, the dynamic nature of tradition meant a single imported text could become the focus of an expanding sequence of commentaries and meta-commentaries, suggesting that the relationship between text and time—that is, the “when” of any single work—could be an expansive and progressively voluminous one. While this process has scarcely been examined for Arabic texts in South Asia, one important recent study traces the many commentaries on the seventeenth-century advanced logic textbook Sullam al-‘Ulum (Ladder of the Sciences), which were written almost entirely in Arabic (with Persian limited to anonymous interlinear notations) until first quarter of the twentieth century, when Urdu commentaries also began to be published.¹⁴

Yet the ascent of Urdu as a language of learned prose by no means meant the eclipse of Arabic. For as Mohsin Ali's essay in this roundtable shows, as the twentieth century progressed Arabic only gained in importance as a language of history-writing by ‘ulamā’ who had previously spurned tārīkh (history) as lying outside of the religious sciences. Moreover, building on the reputations of earlier Indian scholars in the Hijaz, by the mid-twentieth century there emerged a new diaspora of South Asian Arabic-medium authors and teachers based in what was by then Saudi Arabia, not least those associated with the Mecca-based Muslim World League and the Islamic University of Medina, which became major promoters of Arabic studies across South Asia.¹⁵

Where: Spatial Aspects of South Asian Arabic

Like the question of “when,” the issue of “where” for Arabic in South Asia is far from self-explanatory. Even as innocuous and inclusive a label as “South Asian Arabic” begs basic questions concerning the spatial configurations of Arabic-use across the diverse geography of the South Asian subcontinent. The first seeds of Arabic were carried to the region along at least two different routes—overland and oversea—then sown in furrows leading from the imperial dominions of the ‘Abbasids then Ghaznavids into Sindh and Punjab, and from the maritime emporia of Arabian merchants into the hinterlands of coastal Gujarat and Malabar. Simple as this is to surmise, this early period remains the most problematic and debated, not least due to the paucity of surviving sources from South Asia itself (such as the Persian rendition of the purportedly Arabic original of the history of the Arab conquests in Sindh, known as the Chachnama).¹⁶ From the thirteenth century, another sketch map points to the ascendance and dissemination of Persian after the founding of the Delhi Sultanate in 1206, followed by the Tughluq sultans’ conquests to the east and south. This prompted Richard Eaton to delineate a Perso-Islamic “cultural axis” linking the cities of Khurasan and Central Asia to their urban Persianate counterparts between Delhi, Bengal, and the Deccan.¹⁷ But since Arabic remained ever-present (if not omnipresent) across this “Persianate” space—whether in the closed confines of madrasas, the mumbling of private prayers, or the public splendor of epigraphy—there remains the question of how we should configure the geography of Arabic in relation to this Persianate axis.¹⁸ The easiest way to reinstate Arabic in this Persianate space would be to think of it terms of a Perso-Arabic geography, but this is surely to dodge rather than detect what were perhaps distinct locales, routes, and institutions of Arabic-learning. The most obvious example is the western littoral of India, from Gujarat through the Konkan to Malabar, which has generated a number of studies in recent years.¹⁹ The oceanic character of this coastal region suggests the terrestrial notion of an axis is less suitable than a maritime plexus that required regular movement between the Middle East and South Asia to remain alive.²⁰ This is particularly true when we factor in the Hijaz and Hadramawt as sites of learned interaction with a range of spaces across South Asia, both coastal and interior.²¹ These factors suggest that language-use creates its own geographies, a translocal sphere of the kind Ronit Ricci dubbed an “Arabic cosmopolis.”²²

Yet Arabia could also play the role of geographical intermediary, as when the Arabic works of the Moroccan sufi Ahmad Zarruq (d.1493) were studied there by the Gujarati ‘Ali Muttaqi (d.1568), who in turn transmitted them to his Indian homeland. Or, on a larger scale, with the transmission from Egypt to Gujarat, via Yemen, of the imamate and teachings of Fatimid Isma‘ilism to foster the Bohra community of Gujarat, who thereafter revived their linguistic and geographical links to the spaces of their collective past.²³ From the mid-nineteenth century, Bombay and its Arabian outpost of Aden became major sites of Arabic-based interactions, written and spoken, between Arab and Indian Muslims (including many of the latter who considered themselves ancestrally Arab).²⁴ Looking beyond Arabia, though, we know far too little about the wider engagements of either South Asian Muslims or their Arabic writings in other Arabic-using regions of Asia and Africa.²⁵

Such attempts to map the networked geography of Arabic on the larger scale should not mislead us to picturing the language as solely an urban, even less a solely littoral, phenomenon.²⁶ Here, institutional geography may be the most useful scale, potentially helping us to chart the spread of Arabic-use through mosques, maktabs, madrasas, and khanaqahs located not only in cities, but also in small qaṣba and harbor towns.²⁷ Indistinct as he is in the scholarship, the figure of the small town qadi—resorted to for the resolution of quotidian disputes—is perhaps the most elusive evidencer of the penetration of Arabic across South Asia. Less elusive—but still the focus of remarkably little scholarship—is the Arabic corpus of technical taṣawwuf and falsafa which was read in at least some khanaqahs and madrasas across the subcontinent.²⁸ But which institutions and how they related we hardly know, further limiting our sense of the where of Arabic in South Asia.

Together with the obvious fact that at an oral, memorized, and embodied level, Arabic is present wherever Muslims pray, the literate qadi, the aspiring talib, and the unlettered worshipper take us from the “where” to the “who” of Arabic in South Asia—including the question of the relationship of Arabic to the region's larger non-Muslim populations.

Who: Social Aspects of South Asian Arabic

Despite their plain significance for the history of South Asian Muslims, ‘ulama’ remain a remarkably neglected focus of inquiry, particularly in comparison to the extensive secondary literature on their counterparts in the Middle East.²⁹ Building on the extensive scholarship on the history of sufis in South Asia, a similar corpus of hagiographies and biographical dictionaries could be used to produce social histories of ‘ulama’, whether for particular institutions or regions (reflecting the organizational structure of many primary sources), or for particular polities or periods.³⁰ This neglect is even more the case with regard to the social history of ‘ulama’; that is, their relations with their varied clients, whether rulers or ruled, and how this in turn shaped the interplay between Arabic texts, their specialist interpreters, and their larger human environments.³¹ Indeed, the question of the social penetration of shari`a—whether state-promulgated ‘ulama’ rulings or more local legal decisions—has only recently begun to be systematically investigated in line with the recent growth of applied legal history via studies of not only of jurisprudential treatises but also of qadis and their rulings in particular times and places.³²

This is not only a question that relates to the history of Muslims: the legal status of non-Muslims (dhimma) under Muslim rule was a major concern of at least some Mughal imperial jurists.³³ Moreover, as recent studies have shown, shari‘a-based commercial contracts were used by a variety of Hindu and Muslim merchants around the Indian Ocean, while also finding their way—through adaptation or equivalence—into contracts drawn up in South Asian vernacular languages used by non-Muslim traders.³⁴ Nor was the ‘ālim (pl. ‘ulama’) the only knowledge-worker to deploy his mastery of Arabic texts for such broad clienteles. Another possible example is the ḥakīm, or the expert in Yunānī ṭibb (Greco-Arabic medicine), particularly prior to what seems to have been the increasing communalization of traditional medicine in the late colonial era—an era that saw the Hindu medical public urged to use Ayurveda specialists at the same time that Yunānī ṭibb began to spread for the first time among Muslims in colonial Sri Lanka.³⁵

Hindus’ employment of Muslim legal or medical specialists in turn begs the question of whether different Hindu groups learned Arabic for themselves. Since thousands of members of the kayasth scribal caste were employed by Muslim-ruled polities—whether the Mughal Empire or the many smaller successor states that survived until 1947—some degree of facility with Arabic, not only Persian, would presumably have been an additional professional asset. There is some evidence that kayasths occasionally studied Arabic in addition to Persian, not least as a corollary of having studied alongside Muslims in madrasas.³⁶ But despite the growing literature on Persian-using kayasths, their relationship with Arabic is yet to be addressed in any detail.

Such common and cooperative use of Arabic should be set alongside its role in inter-religious boundary-maintenance and even polemic.³⁷ While, for understandable political reasons, such topics have received far less scholarly attention than the “composite culture” of Hindu-Muslim cosmopolitanism (particularly via Persian), critical evaluations and the delineation of difference were a part of the Arabic (and Persian, and for that matter Sanksrit and Hindi) textual landscape of South Asia, raising questions about both the impact of such texts on actual social relations and their relationship with their better-known cosmopolitan counterparts.³⁸ Yet Hindus were by no means the only, or even the prime, focus of such works. An initial survey of surviving manuscripts suggests that far more inter-Muslim sectarian polemics were written than anti-Hindu ones, while the onset of Christian missionary critiques of Islam in the early nineteenth century generated a responding series of Muslim (as well as Hindu, and in Sri Lanka, Buddhist) critiques of Christianity.³⁹ Arabic played an important part here too, whether through critical or defensive quotations from the Qur'an and hadith or as a learned medium for detailed refutations of Christian doctrine that, in the case of Jawad ibn Sabat's 1814 Barahin as-Sabatiyya (Proofs of Sabat) and Rahmatullah Kairanawi's 1867 Izhar al-Haqq (Clarification of Truth), were also diligent studies of the scripture and theology of a different religion.⁴⁰ Still, it is worth pointing out again that inter-Muslim polemics appear to have been the more prolific genre, albeit one that has garnered similarly little attention, including in terms of impact on social relations.⁴¹ Nor should we be tempted into facile contrasts between an inclusive, pluralizing Persian literary corpus and an exclusive, scripturalist Arabic counterpoint. For in the 1920s, Arabic translations of Gandhi, Tagore, and various Sanskrit classics offered a new outlet for positive inter-religious engagements between Christians and Muslims in the Middle East and Hindus and Muslims in India.⁴²

Yet it would be counterproductive and counterfactual to deny the close relationship between Arabic learning and the deeper engagement with Islamic tradition. As Tahera Qutbuddin has calculated, around eighty-five percent of the South Asian Arabic books listed by Brockelmann relate to Qur'an and hadith studies, jurisprudence, sufism, theology, and hagiography, with only around fifteen percent on “secular” subjects, such as philology, philosophy, belles-lettres, and medicine (though Zubaid Ahmad lists 360 Indian-authored Arabic “religious” works and 217 in “secular” fields).⁴³ However, as our sketch of the social dimensions of Arabic in South Asia already suggests, these bald statistics should not prevent us from recognizing the many purposes of the language beyond formal religious studies. And, beyond the limited social sphere of authors, motivations for learning Arabic have also encompassed symbolic capital, employment prospects, and paid services, whether for the state-sponsored mufti, the community Qur'an-reciter, the prospective bride, the talisman-maker, or the migrant worker.

In addressing the “who” of Arabic in South Asia, there also of course remains the crucial question of gender. This applies to most if not all of the issues touched on in the previous paragraphs, whether through the impact of legal rulings on women (including non-Muslim wives) or direct female engagements with the Arabic textual tradition. In contexts of multilingualism and widespread non-literacy, “direct” female engagement must necessarily be conceived in several ways, ranging from the oral memorization of Qur'an sections and often-lengthy du‘ā’ prayers to the copying of Arabic talismans (usually known in South Asia by the Arabic term ta‘wīdh) and the formal study of Arabic texts.⁴⁴ However, while there is now extensive historical literature on female Muslim education and literary production in South Asia, the focus has been overwhelmingly on English, Urdu and to a lesser extent Persian, providing few comparable counterparts to the women hadith scholars known from scholarship on the Middle East.⁴⁵

In such ways, the social penetration of Arabic cut not only across space, but also across gender and religious boundaries, albeit in ways we are yet to understand. Even as manuscript catalogues demonstrate that the majority of (surviving) Arabic texts in South Asia focused on Muslim religious topics, attention to the social life of Arabic suggests that the language served as a medium of engagement—both collaborative and conflictual—with various non-Muslim groups, whether Hindu scribes, merchants, and medical patients; British Orientalists, administrators, or missionaries; or Arab Christians and fellow Muslims overseas.

How: Operational Aspects of South Asian Arabic

Turning from questions of “who” to issues of “how” Arabic was used in South Asia, the sheer range of media used for the language open a vista of research possibilities. These multiple media comprised not only paper documents, both handwritten and printed, but also coinage, epigraphy, and both communicative and ritual speech. For whether through its lexical incorporation into local languages, its use as a liturgical language, or its use as a spoken language of labor for the many thousands of émigré workers in the Gulf states, Arabic also retains an important place in the oral sphere of South Asian Muslim life.⁴⁶ Behind each of these cases lies the question of how Arabic was learned, not only in terms of the institutional “where” of madrasa and chancery, but also in terms of the pedagogic “how” of teaching techniques and textbooks.⁴⁷ While this is generally invisible for the medieval centuries, the survival of teaching manuals of later periods offers potential for addressing this topic, as researchers already have with regard to the learning of Persian in South Asia.⁴⁸ Yet elementary rubrics and grammars formed only one part of a wider spectrum of lexicographical works that also included Mughal-era commentaries on more complex works of Arabic grammar, such as the eponymous Sharh al-Radi (Radi's Commentary) of Radi al-Din al-Astarabadi (d. 1287 or 89).⁴⁹ Such was the continued confidence of nineteenth-century South Asian scholars that, in the case of Nawab Muhammad Siddiq Khan of Bhopal and his al-Bulgha fi Usul al-Lugha (A Sufficiency in the Roots of Philology, published in Istanbul), their output included engagements with major works of Arabic linguistics by the likes of Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti (d. 1505).⁵⁰

Even so, South Asia remained a region where written Arabic could be read by very few—a fact that stands in striking contrast to the existence of so many monumental inscriptions in the region. For many regions of the subcontinent, Arabic inscriptions constitute the earliest surviving Islamic texts.⁵¹ Often (though by no means always) Qur'anic inscriptions, such “public texts” raise important questions of verbal communication versus symbolic affirmation; and of how inscriptions affect and effect the meaning of buildings and the ceremonies that take place in them.⁵² Other Arabic public texts were found on coins, which, unlike static buildings, circulated far and wide. Such coin inscriptions are not solely sources on the Muslim past, but can also be used to understand processes of interaction—whether accommodation or transformation—with non-Muslim milieux.⁵³ A vivid example is the large-scale issuing of Arabic-script coinage by the Kashmir Smast Hindu cave temple complex during the eleventh and twelfth centuries.⁵⁴ The potential insights to be drawn from such early yet enduring stone and metal texts shows their significance far beyond the recondite realms of epigraphic and numismatic studies.

Returning to paper, the realm of documentation—whether ijāzāt, shajārāt, waqf, or other legal and official documents—remains woefully under-explored in South Asia, not least with regard to how such documents were used as paper instruments with effects on the surrounding world.⁵⁵ Partly this may be due to the absence of any surviving Mughal equivalent to the Ottoman imperial archive.⁵⁶ But there remain many other repositories of Arabic documentation, particularly private religious institutions. There are also innumerable modern examples of what is perhaps the most ubiquitous form of paper instrument in South Asia—the written talisman—which raise questions of where, when, and whom Arabic serves as a lingua magica rather than a lingua franca.⁵⁷

There also of course remain hundreds of formal Arabic texts authored in South Asia, along with many more imported, copied, and commented on there. New approaches to intellectual and literary history are examining the intertwined writing and reading practices that characterized this “culture of colophons” in which Arabic manuscript texts were circulated, copied, and commented on, whether between South Asia and Arabia or between distinct but as-yet poorly descried centers of Arabic learning in South Asia itself.⁵⁸ Nor did these manuscript methods of reading and writing disappear with the rise of print, which (as it had earlier in Europe) coexisted and mingled with manuscript production well into the twentieth century, albeit in ways not yet understood.

Recent years have seen the history of the printed book emerge as a lively field in Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies. But the history of Arabic printing in South Asia—happily the focus of Sohaib Baig's contribution to this roundtable—has somehow fallen between the linguistic cracks of Area Studies.⁵⁹ This is doubly unfortunate, not only because the history of Middle Eastern and South Asian printing is deeply intertwined, but also because the earlier expansion of South Asian vis-à-vis Middle Eastern printing—in both technical and commercial terms—produced such a startling range of Arabic books.⁶⁰ Perhaps none is more surprising than the first ever Arabic printed edition of the Arabian Nights, issued in Calcutta between 1814 and 1818, which not only predates the first Middle Eastern imprint—the larger Bulaq edition of 1835—but also precedes the founding of Egypt's pioneering Bulaq Press itself. The traffic in printed texts was by no means one way, however. For just as Middle Eastern Arabic texts were printed in Calcutta, Bombay, Lucknow and Hyderabad, South Asian Arabic “classics” such as al-‘Utbi's history of the early Ghaznavid sultanate were printed in Cairo (albeit, in al-‘Utbi's case, combined with an Ottoman Syrian commentary that belied the Orientalist concern with purified critical editions disconnected from commentarial traditions).⁶¹ In contrast to recent studies of the circulation and reception of manuscripts, the question of how such South Asian Arabic printed works interacted with what has been conceived as the “Arabic cosmopolis” of the Indian Ocean remains unanswered.⁶²

Imported European (then American) technologies not only impacted the circulation of written Arabic texts. They also transformed how oral texts were communicated through the rise of song recordings. As with printing a century earlier, the swifter development of gramophone technology in India in the early twentieth century enabled Bombay and its satellite port of Aden to become important sites for the recording and distribution of Arabic songs (particularly from the Gulf).⁶³ This paved the way for the more recent relationship between Bollywood and Arabic, which ranges from the opening of studios in Dubai specializing in subtitling and dubbing to the collaborative co-productions of Arabic versions of Bollywood songs, as discussed in Ada Petiwala's contribution to this roundtable.

A more formal mode of engagement with overseas Arabic-users was the written letter. Although the occasional rare surviving letter helps illuminate Mamluk-era engagements with Indian trading ports, this was by no means solely a medieval and early modern phenomenon.⁶⁴ For the expansion of the British imperial postal system, in which Aden was positioned as the key communicational waystation between Calcutta and London, meant that the geography of Indo-Arab interaction was built into the epistolary infrastructure of empire. As a colonial postmaster's manual testifies, this resulted in the mailing from India of Arabic letters written in a range of calligraphic styles favored by the different regions and communities of the subcontinent.⁶⁵ Arabic also functioned in different periods as a formal diplomatic language, to the extent that at least some of the secretaries recently framed as primarily Persian specialists were similarly trained in Arabic letter-writing.⁶⁶

Nor was such Arabic-based diplomacy solely an epistolary phenomenon. The second half of the twentieth century saw the founding of Arabic journals in both India and Pakistan as tools of state cultural diplomacy by government departments such as the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (Majlis al-Hind li-l-Rawabit al-Thaqafiyya).⁶⁷ By the 1980s, non-state actors (albeit sometimes with state funding) dispatched Arabic journals and translations in the opposite direction when the anti-Soviet struggle in Afghanistan and its support bases in Pakistan prompted the rapid proliferation of jihadist journals and other genres, such as hagiographical martyrologies.⁶⁸ Also gaining traction by the 1980s was a more constructive mode of Islamist politics: the Arabic and Urdu discourse of “Islamic finance” emerging from a century-long re-conception of Islamic commercial law in the light of modern Western economics, which found institutional outlets between the Gulf states, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.⁶⁹

These issues of interaction in turn lead us to ask how Arabic related to other languages in South Asia. One mode was via the translation of specific texts, of which the Qur'an has been by far the most closely investigated.⁷⁰ But other modes of translation remain to be explored, not least the translation of Arabic works into Persian (medical works are a case in point), which would help us better understand how the relationship between these two languages evolved across time, space, and subject matter. Building on SherAli Tareen's point that translation from Arabic into Indian vernacular languages formed a “powerful medium of hermeneutical populism,” there is also the question of how translations into Urdu helped such Arabic “classics” as the Muqadimma of Ibn Khaldun and the Riḥla of Ibn Battuta to be re-discovered (or, perhaps, plainly discovered in South Asia for the first time) as a result of complex engagements with Orientalism.⁷¹ But more modern works also found their way into Indian languages. By the 1900s, Urdu renditions of Arabic novels were proving popular, particularly the historical fiction of Jurji Zaydan (1861–1914), which together with translations of Sir Walter Scott may have shaped the development of the Urdu historical novel over the following decades.

Compared with rich recent scholarship on translations from Sanskrit to Persian, far less attention has been paid lately to the translation of Sanskrit works into Arabic, which began at a distance in ‘Abbasid Baghdad and then proceeded within the space of al-Hind through the peregrinations and collaborations of al-Biruni (d. ca. 1048).⁷² Far from ceasing after this early phase of “first contact,” such translations continued into later centuries. As in the earlier ‘Abbasid and Ghaznavid cases, there seem to have been specific topics of interest, not least of which was the distinctly Indian science of Yoga.⁷³ By the twentieth century, a wider selection of Sanskrit works would find their way into Arabic, albeit through textual transfers by then intertwined with Orientalist editions (including via bridging translations into English and French).⁷⁴ Yet there were also cases of direct translation from Indian languages into Arabic, including the detailed Arabic study of Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938) written by the long-term Indian resident of Cairo, Muhammad Hasan Aʻzami, in the 1950s, as well as the many essays in broader Indo-Arab cultural translation written by Muhi al-Din al-Alwa'i, who worked as editor of the Ṣawt al-Hind (Voice of India) journal published from 1967 by the Indian embassy in Cairo.⁷⁵ A more complex case is seen in the Arabic translations of Rumi's Persian poetry in the 1960s (reprinted in Cairo as recently as 2021) in the fourth volume of the biographical Rijal al-Fikr wa-l-Daʿwa fi al-Islam (Thinkers and Preachers in Islam) by the aforementioned prominent north Indian scholar, Abu Hasan ‘Ali Nadwi.⁷⁶

Asking how Arabic related to South Asian languages also points to another mode of interaction: the more subtle and slower processes of linguistic change that shaped new written languages in the region. The role of Persian is far better studied (or perhaps at times assumed) in generating “Persianate” qua Persianized languages and literatures in South Asia. But, returning to the issue of the “where” of Arabic in South Asia and how this geography overlapped with or diverged from that of Persian, it is worth asking whether the Arabi-Malayalam and Arabu-Tamil literatures of the Malabar and Coromandel coasts can correspondingly be considered as “Arabicate.”⁷⁷ The similar case of Lisan al-Da‘wa—the Arabized form of Gujarati used by the Bohra Isma‘ilis—is examined in Michael O'Sullivan's contribution to this roundtable.

Case Studies in Lieu of Conclusions

Paving the way for the case study essays that follow, this survey has pointed to the varied chronological, spatial, and social configurations of Arabic in South Asia, along with the operational dimensions of different media and translation practices that have shaped the region's varied engagements with the language. The aim here has been to take stock of a field that has never yielded its full potential, not least by falling through the linguistic fissures of Area Studies. Yet as many of the preceding footnote citations suggest, recent years have seen renewed attention to the use of Arabic as a language within South Asia (“Arabic in India”); the shared use of Arabic between South Asia, the Middle East, and the Indian Ocean more broadly (“Arabic and India”); and the tertiary topic of representations of South Asia in Arabic texts (“India in Arabic”). At once building on and challenging the ascent of “Persianate” studies over the past few decades, such studies point us to the older—and ultimately more enduring—history of South Asia's relationship with Arabic.

While the previous pages have drawn this scholarship together both to sketch broad parameters and pose problems for a maturing field, the question of an overarching label has been deliberately sidestepped. This leaves aside whether, pace existing models of “Indo-Persian” and the “Persianate world,” it is fruitful to think in terms of “Indo-Arabic” and a larger “Arabicate world” that incorporates but is not restricted to South Asia. But given the multilingual settings in which South Asian Arabic necessarily participates, it would clearly be counterproductive to study Arabic in isolation from either Persian or the various regional languages. And so, in methodological terms, we must try whenever possible to position Arabic in relation to these other languages, thereby building on Marshall Hodgson's original definition of the “Persianate” as being more than solely Persian—regardless of whether we then come to speak of a corresponding “Arabicate world” that, via Arabic-influenced literatures such as the African ‘Ajami languages, Arabu-Tamil, and Jawi Malay, reaches from sub-Saharan Africa through South Asia to Southeast Asia.

For now, though, the more pressing need is for further studies of Arabic texts and documents from and on South Asia. This brings us finally to the seven case-study essays that make up the main substance of this roundtable. As part of the new generation of scholars alluded to above, their authors are all early career scholars whose research addresses different aspects of the triangle of Arabic in India, Arabic and India, and India in Arabic. The chronological focus of their essays extends from the early modern to the colonial and contemporary eras, taking in a geography that reaches from Gujarat, Bengal, and Bollywood to Egypt, the Hijaz, and Dubai. Ranging in genre from historiography, biography, and theology to legal texts, polemics, and songs, the sources under scrutiny vary similarly in their media from manuscripts to printed books to trans-imperial journals and film. Finally, given the importance of reckoning with South Asian multilingualism, several essays examine the interplay of Arabic with Gujarati, Urdu, and Hindi. For if there is or was an “Arabicate world,” then it is in such linguistic fusions and collusions that we will begin to recover its history.