Arabic in India: a survey and classification of its uses, compared with Persian.

• Author: Qutbuddin, Tahera

Arabic in India carries an almost absolute Islamic identity, to the extent that even the study of pre-Islamic pagan poetry is ascribed to a spiritual impetus. This is not surprising, for it is generally acknowledged that the Arabic language has a predominantly sacred character outside the Arabic speaking Middle East. However, the functional manifestation of the language in the subcontinent has great historical significance and has not been systematically explored. (1) To this end, this paper presents a survey of the uses of Arabic in India from its arrival in the eighth century through the twentieth, under the following eight-part classification: liturgy, teaching and study, nomenclature, inscriptions, vocabulary assimilation, composition of religio-scholarly texts, composition of secular-scholarly texts, and marginal utilitarian uses. Details of the uses of Persian--the other major foreign language brought here by Muslims, which flourished side by side with Arabic for many centuries--are offered here as foil, inasmuch as they bring into sharper focus the scriptural face of Indian Arabic.

The first acquaintance of the residents of the Indian subcontinent with the Arab people came about when Arab sailors first docked at Indian ports in order to acquire spices in pre-Islamic times, perhaps as far in the past as 50 C. E. This early trade contact occurred two centuries before Arab was attested as a distinct language in the Arabian Peninsula in the third century. Trade contacts persisted, and at some point in time, through Arab traders, Indians must have gained rudimentary acquaintance with the Arabic language. In the seventh century, the Arabian Peninsula witnessed the birth of Islam, and the majority of Arabs became Muslim. One century later, in 711, the Arab-Muslim Umayyad commander Muhammad b. al-Qasim al-Thaqafi invaded and conquered the western Indian province of Sind. Arab Muslims settled there, and with their colonization of Sind came India's first substantial and sustained contact with both the religion of Islam and the Arabic language. At this time, Indians began to convert to Islam. (2) The initial act required of any convert, the recitation of the Islamic creed of faith, "[la ilaha ill.sup.a] 'llah, [muhammad.sup.un] [rasul.sup.u] 'llah" (There is no god but God, Muhammad is the messenger of God), had an Arabic linguistic frame, which meant that Indian converts to Islam came into contact with Arabic through their very first religious experience. Arabic also had religious prestige as the language of Islamic scripture, believed by the majority of Muslims to be inseparable from the message; (3) moreover, familiarity with the Arabic Qur'an was deemed necessary for the correct ritual practice of Islam. (4) For these reasons, Indian exposure to the Arabic language was primarily through the medium of religion, and Arabic came to India as the language of Islam.

Non-sacred Arabic hegemony was promoted in many parts of the world by political, social, and economic factors. So much so, that in some of the lands conquered by the Arab Muslims, such as Coptic-speaking Egypt, (5) Arabic almost entirely displaced and replaced the local languages. In India, however, this did not happen, mainly because Arab Muslims did not have political control over more than the western provinces, and this control was for a limited time. The major Muslim dynasties in India were of Turkic origin, and their cultural language was, in the main, Persian. Other than the colony in Sind, Arab Muslim presence in India was constituted by small and early Arab trader settlements of mostly Yemeni and Basran descent on the Malabar coast (details in section VIII), by limited contingents of Yemeni mercenary soldiers employed by various Muslim rulers, and by occasional Arab visitors. Thus, Arab Muslims never really had a major presence in India. The locals continued for the most part to use their own Indo-European and Dravidian languages, with Arabic playing a subsidiary (albeit religiously significant) linguistic role.

Historically, Arabic has been used in India almost exclusively by its Muslim population, and has been a key force in delineating and shaping Indian Muslim identity (6) Currently, it is used almost solely by the 13.19 million Muslims who form 13.43 percent of the total 1.03 billion Indian population. (7) Conversely, almost all Muslims in India appear to have some acquaintance with Arabic. From the early eighth century, Arabic in India has borne an Islamic identity, which has continued to be elaborated and strengthened through the thirteen centuries of its use under Muslim, Hindu, and British rule. The succeeding dynasties of Muslim rulers--including the Ghaznavids, Ghurids, slave-Sultans, Khaljis, Tughlaqs, and Lodis in and around Delhi, the Bahmanis and Adil-Shahis in the Deccan, the Shah-Mirs in Kashmir, the Sultans in Gujarat, the Ilyas-Shahis in Bengal, and the powerful Mughal emperors who ruled the entire Indian subcontinent--all these dynasties, even though the language of their court administration was one of the Indian languages or Persian, continued to patronize Arabic-Islamic scholars and to promote the study of Arabic for religious purposes. In 1947, after India gained independence from British rule and was partitioned, Pakistan and later Bangladesh developed vis-a-vis Arabic in different directions--such as the proposals voiced in Pakistan by various political groups in the 1950s and 1970s that Arabic be adopted as the national language (8)--which fall outside the scope of this article. In India, in the decades following Independence, Arabic usage was also modified in minor ways, but its Islamic identity was preserved and continues to be preserved today. Considering the future of Arabic usage in India, among the factors inhibiting it is the decline of Persian and Urdu and with it the decline of the Arabic-script reading populace. Some positive influences are India's growing economic prosperity (and subsequent rise in education) combined with Islamic revivalist trends. It will be interesting to see how the conflicting forces play out.

Let us compare the history of Arabic in India to that of Persian. (9) Persian flourished in the subcontinent from the twelfth through the nineteenth centuries (especially from the late sixteenth through the eighteenth), largely with court patronage. It had a prominent place in Indian society at all levels, in both its Muslim and non-Muslim segments, with mainly literary and government functions, as well as Sufi religious ones. The earliest formal relationship between India and Persian was formed with the establishment of Ghaznavid power in Punjab in the early eleventh century, when a high literary tradition of Persian, primarily poetic, took root. By the time of the conquest of north India in the twelfth century by the Turkish Ghurids, Persian had evolved as a literary language throughout Central Asia, and under the patronage of the Delhi Sultans, Persian writers, scribes, and poets flourished through the early fifteenth century, particularly when Sikandar Lodi (r. 1488-1517) completely Persianized the administration. When Chingiz Khan invaded the Perso-Islamic world in the thirteenth century, many Persian speakers migrated to northern India, and a coherent Perso-Islamic identity (in opposition to Arab culture) was linked positively with the term "'Ajam." Under the Mughals, particularly Akbar (r. 1556-1605), there was an efflorescence of Persian literary culture in a large part of India, and Persian became the first language of the king and the court. Akbar formally declared it the language of the Mughal administration at all levels; it thus became an important tool for career advancement, particularly in the civil service. Persian also became a second language, perhaps even something approaching a first language, for many Indians. But with the waning of Mughal power and patronage, Persian declined rapidly in India; particularly when the rising British colonial power replaced it with English as the language of administration and education in India in 1835. Its use in the beginning of the twenty-first century has narrowed to a tiny number of scholars.

A word should be added here about the sources for this study. In addition to synthesizing data from disparate multilingual secondary works such as those listing madrasas (religious schools) of India and bibliographies of Indian-Arabic texts, this paper stems from research conducted in varied primary source materials. Some of these original sources are Arabic books and poetry composed in India, manuscript catalogues of Indian libraries, madrasa curricula, inscriptions on monuments and tombs, and catalogues of inscriptions and coins. Additionally, I have included findings from field work conducted in India for brief periods over the past several years, including interviews with Indian Muslim scholars of Arabic, visits to madrasas and monument sites, observation of Muslim nomenclature, and examination of Arabic vocabulary incorporation.

With brief remarks pointing out the analogous or divergent uses of Persian where relevant, the following pages present a detailed survey and classification of the uses of Arabic in India.

1. LITURGY: QUR'AN, RITUAL PRAYER (SALAK), DU 'A' TASBIH, AND RELIGIOUS POETRY

One of the most common uses of Arabic in India is liturgical. This includes Qur'anic recitation, litanies (tasbih), prose prayers (dua), formulaic expressions connected with the ritual prayer (salah), Sufi chants (dhikr), and the chanting of religious poetry (qasida, na't, munajat, and marthiya).

The recitation of the Arabic Qur'an is considered by Muslims a meritorious act and forms an important part of their religiosity. In India, Muslims recite the Qur'an avidly, but generally without understanding the literal meaning. Nevertheless, they still see it as an act that brings the reciter closer to God and wins him or her divine grace (baraka)...