Kamala Thiagarajan writes for BBC Travel about a very interesting form of Tamil, starting with a dramatic anecdote:
One warm summer evening in 2008, when Mohamed Sultan Baqavi was a 26-year-old student at Arabic College in the South Indian town of Vellore, he made a remarkable discovery. After offering prayers in the city’s Labaabeen Qabrusthan mosque, where generations of his spiritual gurus were laid to rest, he caught sight of a man sweeping the courtyard.
The man gathered the debris – scraps of paper, rubble and leaves – and piled them up beside a dried-up well near the mosque’s entrance to set alight. As Baqavi was preparing to leave, a gentle breeze blew his way, carrying with it a page from the rubbish heap. When he pried it from his face, Baqavi was startled to find that the scrap of paper was a part of a book. He knew that some mosques used their dried-out wells as storage for rare manuscripts, and stray pages from these often littered courtyards. Could this be one of them, he wondered?
Baqavi took a closer look at the now-burning heap of rubbish and hurriedly fished out an entire book from the bonfire. After dousing the flames, he opened it to find pages of rare script that he immediately recognised. It was written in the long-lost language of Arwi.
Baqavi, now a professor at Jamia Anwariyya Arabic College in the South Indian state of Kerala, had been reading Arwi literature since he was four years old. But very few people, even among Muslims who read Arabic, could recognise this script.
Arwi dates to the 8th Century CE when travel and trade in the medieval world sparked a curious intermingling of tongues. It leapt to prominence in the 17th Century, when more Muslim Arab traders landed in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, which was full of Tamil speaking people. The traders brought with them rich tapestries and the finest textiles and perfumes like frankincense and myrrh – records say they longed to establish a deeper connection with the local people because they felt connected by a common religion but spoke two different languages.
The Arabic that the traders spoke intermingled with the local language of Tamil to create what scholars call Arabu Tamil, or Arwi. The script employs a modified alphabet of Arabic, but the actual words and their meanings are borrowed from the local Tamil dialect.
“Arabic Tamil, called Arwi, was just one of the many languages that found expression in Arabic script,” explained Mahmood Kooria, a lecturer in the history of the Indian Ocean world before 1750, at the University of Edinburgh. “The Indian Ocean trade at the time was dominated by Arabian and Persian traders who landed in India before European colonialists,” he said. “Travel and trade shaped how these languages evolved.” […]
Arwi extended to nearby Sri Lanka, which had its own Tamil-speaking population too. And though the language was thought to be on the brink of extinction after the 18th Century, when European colonial powers began to dominate the Indian Ocean trade and native speakers began to dwindle, today it’s facing a curious revival. University graduates are studying it, and in a handful of villages along the coast, many Muslim women pride themselves in singing prayer songs in the ancient tongue. […]
Some scholars believe that Arwi’s popularity during the 17th Century was due to the inter-marriage of Arab seafarers and local Tamil Muslim women, and also because it helped the traders deepen business ties – they were able to master a complex language like Tamil using the Arabic script that they were already familiar with.
“Tamil has 247 letters. Arwi had a much more manageable alphabet – just 40 letters – perfect for medieval seafarers who wanted to quickly pick up proficiency in the tongue… enough to trade and earn their livelihood in a new land,” said K MA Ahamed Zubair, associate professor of Arabic at The New College in Chennai, who teaches the Arwi script to his students.
I was particularly pleased to see the centering of women in the story:
As a result of colonialism, manuscripts also found their way to the British library in London, where they are housed today. Kooria, who reads and writes Arabic Malayalam, has been assisting the British Library in cataloguing these texts for the last four years. “I was stunned to find so many on history, religion, medicine and culture; [and] many of these were written by women,” he said.
A significant number of these books by women authors were written for other women, addressing issues such as childbirth and sexuality, and reflecting on domestic issues or discussing cuisines and culture, said Ophira Gamliel, a lecturer in South Asian Religions at the University of Glasgow. “It’s proof of how Muslim women had a strong voice and identity and were part of a matrilineal tradition,” said Gamliel.
And while these fusion dialects are not spoken on a daily basis anymore, Arwi and Arabic Malayalam still live on today because of these books and songs. […] Getting together to sing these songs is a big social event. “It’s like a women’s club,” laughed 18-year-old Khizr Magfira, who is studying a bachelor’s degree in commerce at a local college in Kayalpatnam. “Every household has at least one member who knows Arwi well and speaks fluently,” she added.
“In the narrow lanes between our homes, groups of women gather during special occasions such as the birth month of Prophet Mohammed (during the third month in the Islamic calendar, roughly in September) to sing these songs together,” said Magfira. “When I see tears in their eyes as they sing these songs, I know how deeply they understand and cherish it. It’s very therapeutic.”
Links and images, as well as more information, if you click through. Thanks, Trevor!
“the third month in the Islamic calendar, roughly in September”
That’s true this year, but the Islamic calendar is purely lunar, each month beginning with the new moon, with no intercalary months inserted from time to time as in the Hebrew calendar. So about three years ago, the month of the prophet’s birth was roughly October and in another three years or so it will be roughly August, and so on.
Tamil has 247 letters. Arwi had a much more manageable alphabet – just 40 letters – perfect for medieval seafarers who wanted to quickly pick up proficiency in the tongue
Shows the terminal confusion between script and speech which seems to be required for BBC articles on language; like the reference to Arwi as a “language” passim. (Fairly profound ignorance of how the Tamil script actually works, too. You’d have though they could find someone to explain it to them.)
Presumably it has/had a fair bit in the way of Arabic and Persian loanwords and other influences, much like Urdu, though. Unfortunately, what little I can find by googling shows a similar concentration on the script, and says little or nothing about Muslim Tamil as such.
I also wish they would retire phrases like “the ancient tongue.”
Welsh-envy.
Not sure how “40 letters” is arrived at. The figure seem to omit the vowel symbols, more Arabico.
In fairness, the Tamil script involves a fair bit in the way of unobvious combinations between consonant and vowel letters (a bit like Ethiopic), so you could reasonably argue that a fully-vocalised Arabic-based script really is easier. No doubt that would have helped all those “mediaeval seafarers”, who would (naturally) have learnt their spoken Tamil from books … Arrrr!
أررر!
FWIW, this wiki piece on the “Moors” of Sri Lanka does do an okay job of distinguishing between the writing of Tamil in Arwi script and the existence of a “Sri Lankan Muslim Tamil” spoken language variety (further subdivided into “North-Eastern Muslim Tamil” and “Southern Muslim Tamil” on phonological grounds such as whether word-initial plosives are voiced or not) that supposedly differs from other varieties of Tamil spoken in Sri Lanka. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Lankan_Moors#Sri_Lankan_Muslim_Tamil
Well found!
(I’ll get the hang of this Google thing one day, really I will.)
Fairly profound ignorance of how the Tamil script actually works, too. You’d have though they could find someone to explain it to them.
Unicadets think of the Tamil script as an abugida like Devanagari, but actual Tamilphones are taught it as a syllabary using a chart. The same is true of Ethiopic and Canadian syllabics.
And, arguably, the traditional Mongolian script.
Imagine my excitement at being told of a magical language that young Wiccans were using — “it’s really old, and it’s not related to English at all!” — and my disappointment at finding the “language” was a simple alphabet cipher. (“Theban”: no older than Agrippa, I’m afraid. How occultists hanker after ancientry, and how stuck they are in the early modern!)
Hey, Dale, I like your recent post on believing and religion.
Baqavi, now a professor at Jamia Anwariyya Arabic College in the South Indian state of Kerala, had been reading Arwi literature since he was four years old.
I call foul. Of course I could be wrong if he spent his childhood in dried-out wells.
Hey, Dale, I like your recent post on believing and religion.
I agree. He writes this:
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On the other hand, the analytical mind has its own weaknesses. It prefers to dismiss as illusory anything that is can’t be frozen in time and broken into constituent parts. It’s always questing after atoms, fundamental particles, elements. And these experiences are experiences of totality, of gist. No wonder the left hemisphere of the brain shrugs impatiently. They are not the sort of thing it can cope with.
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I never could remember that business about left and right hemispheres. As far as I can tell, each of my hemispheres switches back and forth between impatient shrugs and patient consideration, independently of the other hemisphere. It’s a bit nerve-wracking, especially for other people, but I’m used to it – not being able to make up my mind once and for all about any topic.
We used t’ dream of ‘aving dried out wells of our own t’ read in when I were a lad.
Stu, right hemisphere is where you leave and left hemisphere is where I leave.
I don’t often leave where I came in. When you see the end of a film a second time, you have a better idea of whether it was worth it. Hope springs eternal, and sprains its ankle often enough.
[I fear I am overly fond of making up poetic sayings of uncertain import. That’s why I find “AI”, ChatGPT and so on so boring. Anyone can string words together that seem to make sense.]
Well, anyone but Slavoj Žižek.
I admit defeat. Leaned too far out the window, as they say here.
Unless, of course, Slavoj Žižek is himself a chatbot…
Has he ever been seen in the same room together with ChatGPT?
Stu Clayton says
February 14, 2024 at 5:04 pm
Baqavi, now a professor at Jamia Anwariyya Arabic College in the South Indian state of Kerala, had been reading Arwi literature since he was four years old.
I call foul.
Doesn’t seem implausible to me at all. It’s common across the Muslim world for boys to first gain literacy in the Arabic script, often at home and connected with reading the Qur’an. His father likely taught him to read Arwi (maybe even as a stepping stone to reading Arabic) and may well have had old family documents written in the script.