Arwi: The lost Arabic-Tamil Language of Tamil Muslims
Words by Sumaiya Mustafa
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Arwi: The lost Arabic-Tamil Language of Tamil Muslims by Sumaiya Mustafa
The year was 1978. In the coastal town of Kayalpatnam in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, my 87-year-old great great grandmother, partially blind, was furious one dull afternoon. It was because her 13-year-old twin grandsons opened an old letter that she had kept safely in her life-size wooden chest carved with floral motifs. As her voice reached a hysterical high and she approached them with her fully-bent gait, her grandsons quickly put the letters back in the chest and ran away. I’ve heard multiple iterations of this story from my mother but it took me years to realize one thing; the letters, had they survived, would have become an invaluable artifact of my heritage because the script used in those letters was of an obscure language called “Arwi” or “Arabu Tamil”.
Arwi or Arabu Tamil is a hybrid language that was born out of absolute necessity. An oversimplified definition of Arwi would be Tamil written in Arabic script or “Arabic Tamil”. This sort of phenomenon of fusion has occurred several times across the Indian Ocean region since the 8th century C.E., where the spoken aspect is one language and the writing script is from another language. Other examples are Arabu Malayalam, Arabic Gujarati, Arabic Bengali, even Jawi is a similar hybrid script writing that uses Arabic script for South East Asian languages. Although Arwi or Arabu Tamil had outlived all the others which have died out due to the changing demands of the 20th century.