Introduction: Arabic as a South Asian Language

Abstract

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.” 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.