From script to language: the three identities of ‘Arabic-Tamil’

Abstract

Since at least the eighteenth century, Muslims in southern India and Sri Lanka have been employing the Arabic script to record Tamil texts. Popularly known as ‘Arabic-Tamil’ or ‘Arwi’, this practice has been evaluated in widely divergent manners. While to some, ‘Arabic-Tamil’ is primarily a term reserved for the use of the Arabic script to record Tamil, others perceive it as a different style of Tamil, or even as a completely separate language. Whereas Tamil nationalist discourse has identified ‘Arabic-Tamil’ as a danger to the unity of the Tamil nation, some Muslims celebrate it as the symbol of a separate identity, while yet others lament that ‘Arabic-Tamil’ fails to provide a clean break with Tamil as used by non-Muslims. Even more puzzling is the fact that before the twentieth century, most ‘Arabic-Tamil’ records fail to identify themselves as anything else but ‘Tamil’. This article traces complex histories attaching to the idea of ‘Arabic-Tamil’ to uncover the historical situated-ness of the term and show how it has been linked to political discourses and processes of identity formation throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

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