Somewhere right now, a toddler is holding up a smartphone, tapping the screen with a chubby finger, demanding a cartoon. A delivery rider is following a blue line on a map to a stranger's door. A nurse is checking a patient's lab results on a tablet. A trader in a glass tower is watching numbers flicker green and red. None of them are thinking about the internet. That's the point. It has become so woven into the ordinary business of living that we only notice it the way we notice air — when it isn't there. So let's sit with an uncomfortable question for a moment, gently, the way you'd turn over a stone just to see what's underneath. What if, for some reason — a solar storm, a chain of undersea cable failures, a cyber conflict, a catastrophic technical fault — the world's internet connections went dark. Not for an hour. For days. Maybe weeks. The invisible backbone We tend to picture the internet as something we opt into: a browser tab, an app icon, a ...
* Image Courtesy: BBC/Travel
A language born of trade and faith, written in a script found nowhere else on earth
There is a script that looks, at first glance, like Arabic. The letters curve and join the same way, run right to left the same way, carry the same dots and diacritics. But read it aloud to an Arabic speaker and they will understand almost nothing. Read it aloud to a Tamil speaker, and something remarkable happens — the words come alive. They hear their own mother tongue, dressed in a foreign script.
This is Arwi — also called Arabu-Tamil — one of the world's most unusual and least-known writing traditions. For over a thousand years, it quietly carried the religious life, the poetry, and even the medicine of Tamil-speaking Muslim communities of Sri Lanka and South India. Today, it survives mostly in old trunks, forgotten wells, mosque lofts, and the memories of a shrinking number of scholars and reciters.
This piece of article is an attempt to introduce Arwi to a general audience — what it is, where it came from, what it carried, and why its survival now depends on things its original scribes never could have imagined: scanners, Unicode fonts, and digital archives.
What Exactly Is Arwi?
Arwi is not a separate language in the way Tamil and Arabic are separate languages. It is Tamil — the everyday spoken tongue of the Muslim communities of Sri Lanka, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala's neighboring regions — written using an extended Arabic script. Arabic on its own cannot represent every sound in Tamil, so unknown scholars and scribes, over generations, added extra letters and diacritical marks to the standard Arabic alphabet to capture Tamil vowels and consonants that Arabic doesn't have. The result was a hybrid script of roughly 40 letters: the 28 core Arabic letters plus around a dozen specially modified ones, purpose-built for Tamil pronunciation.
It is often described using the analogy of Urdu, which is Persian-Arabic script layered onto Hindi-based vocabulary — except Arwi's relationship to Tamil is even more intimate, since Tamil itself, not a mixed vocabulary, is what the script encodes.
Linguists classify Arwi as an abjad — a script built around consonants, like Arabic itself — and Wikipedia's language-data lists its known usage stretching from at least the 13th century into limited religious use today, across India and Sri Lanka.
Origins: Trade Winds Carrying a New Alphabet
The story of Arwi begins with the Indian Ocean itself.
According to a BBC Travel feature on the language, Arwi's roots go back to the 8th century CE, when medieval-era trade and travel set different tongues mixing together, and it then rose to real prominence in the 17th century, as growing numbers of Muslim Arab traders settled in Tamil Nadu's Tamil-speaking heartland (BBC Travel, "Arwi: The lost language of the Arab-Tamils," 2024).
In practice, this meant Arab and Persian maritime traders became regular visitors to the ports of the Malabar and Coromandel coasts, and to the harbours of Sri Lanka, drawn by the spice trade — pepper, cinnamon, and other prized goods that Europe and the Middle East craved. Many of these traders didn't just visit; they settled, married into local communities, and over generations their descendants became a distinct social group of Tamil-speaking Muslims — known in different regions as Labbai, Marakkayar, and, in Sri Lanka, as Sri Lankan Moors.
These communities were bound together by a shared faith but separated by language: Arabic on one side, Tamil on the other. Arwi was the practical answer — a written bridge that let Tamil Muslims read their Tamil in a script tied to the sacred language of Islam, and let visiting Arab scholars and traders engage with the local tongue. Building on that 17th-century surge, Arwi thrived for a few centuries more in port towns like Kayalpattinam, Kilakkarai, and Parangipettai in Tamil Nadu, and in the south-western coastal belt of Sri Lanka, before its slow decline set in after European colonial powers came to dominate Indian Ocean trade from the 18th century onward.
Sufism, the Traveling Teachers, and a Living Faith Tradition
Arwi did not spread through trade alone — it spread through teaching. Among the Arab and Persian visitors were Sufi scholars and missionaries, and it was often through their efforts that Islam took deep root in these coastal communities. These teachers adapted themselves to local custom rather than imposing an unfamiliar one wholesale — a pattern still visible today in the region's mosque architecture and in the enduring emphasis on peaceful coexistence with neighboring Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian communities.
Sufi orders (tariqas) — among them lineages connected to the Qadiriyya tradition — used Arwi extensively to teach Quranic exegesis, hadith, jurisprudence (fiqh, notably the Hanafi and Shafi'i schools), and devotional poetry to people who could speak Tamil fluently but could not read Arabic script fluently. Arwi manuscripts of hadith collections and fiqh texts by scholars such as Imam Abu Hanifa and Imam Shafi'i have survived into the present. A Tamil rendering of parts of the Bible was even produced in Arwi in the 1920s, an indication of how broadly the script was used as a vehicle for text, not solely for Islamic content.
The influence of this network of traveling scholars was never confined to South Asia. Related Arabic-based scripts for local languages — Jawi for Malay, Pegon for Javanese, and comparable systems used historically in parts of China's Muslim communities — emerged from similar patterns of Arab and Persian religious and trade contact across maritime and overland Asia, stretching toward Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, and the southern Philippines (including Mindanao). Arwi's closest sibling is Arabi-Malayalam, which plays the same role for Kerala's Muslim community, known there as the Mappila community, as Arwi plays for Tamil-speaking Muslims.
Even today, the religious and social path shaped by those early Sufi teachers continues to guide many local Muslim communities — an emphasis on scholarship, devotional recitation, and coexistence that outlived the script most of it was originally written in.
Arwi written tombstones in the coromandel coast dating from the 1600s (image taken from internet search)
More Than Religion: Poetry, and a Pharmacy of Local Knowledge
While Arwi's core use was religious and educational, its written legacy stretches further. Tamil Muslim poets composed devotional and narrative poetry in Arwi — a tradition still echoed today when Muslim women in some Tamil Nadu villages sing old prayer-songs from memory in the Arwi tradition, even if few can now read the script the songs were once written in.
Arwi also became the written vehicle for something more unexpected: indigenous medicine. The Arab and Persian settlers who intermarried into Tamil and Sri Lankan Muslim communities carried with them the Greco-Arabic medical tradition known as Unani (or Unani Tibb) — a humoral system tracing its intellectual roots to Hippocrates and Galen and refined by scholars like Ibn Sina (Avicenna). In Sri Lanka, this system became deeply woven into the island's own layered tradition of indigenous medicine, sitting alongside Ayurveda, Siddha, and Sri Lanka's native Deshiya Chikitsa practices. Physicians from these Arab-descended communities were reportedly trusted enough to serve as family consultants to regional royalty in earlier centuries.
Crucially, much of this accumulated knowledge — herbal formulations, local plant identification, treatment methods — was recorded and passed down using Arwi script. That makes surviving Arwi manuscripts not just a religious and literary archive, but potentially a botanical and pharmacological one: a record of how communities identified, classified, and used local flora for healing, long before formal scientific documentation existed for many of these plants.
Mubarak Malai is a classical Arwi poetic masterpiece, specifically a revered eulogy and poetic biography dedicated to the Prophet Muhammad. Composed in Hijri 1305 (1887 AD) by the Sri Lankan poet Qadir Shamsuddeen Al Makhdoomi (Kaarbaa Lebbe) from Galle.
Page of a Arwi poetry from Hijri 1314 (Image Courtesy: BBC/Travel)
Arwi Today: A Quiet, Living Echo
Arwi is no longer a language of daily use. UNESCO-style linguistic surveys and recent academic descriptions place it firmly in the "religious use only" category — no community today conducts ordinary conversation in Arwi. But it has not vanished either.
In Sri Lanka, Arwi persists mainly through:
- Religious recitation — Quranic and devotional readings in mosques and religious schools (madrasas) that retain elements of Arwi-based instruction or texts.
- Poetic and devotional performance traditions — communal singing and recitation of old Arwi-composed verses at cultural and religious functions, often carried forward by memorisation rather than by reading the original script.
- Cultural identity — for many Sri Lankan Moor and Tamil Muslim families, an old Arwi manuscript inherited from a grandparent is treated as a sacred heirloom, even if no one in the household can fully read it anymore.
A similar pattern holds in Tamil Nadu, where a handful of scholars — notably at institutions such as The New College, Chennai — still teach the script, and where a modest academic and cultural revival is underway, driven by researchers who see Arwi as an irreplaceable record of a specific, syncretic identity: Muslim by faith, Tamil by tongue.
The Race to Save What's Left
This is where the story turns urgent.
Estimates suggest that more than 2,000 Arwi-scripted books and manuscripts survive across Sri Lanka and South India combined — a number that sounds substantial until you consider how they are stored: in old wells, abandoned lofts, graveyards, and the backs of family cupboards, often unlabeled and slowly decaying. Independent collectors and researchers have described literally rescuing texts from being burned as waste paper, simply because no one in the household could read what they held. Some manuscripts, as a consequence of the colonial period, ended up far from home — held today in institutions like the British Library in London rather than in the communities that produced them.
Three compounding problems make preservation unusually hard:
- Finding the material is the hardest part. Unlike a language with formal state archives, Arwi's manuscripts are scattered across private homes and informal community collections, with no centralized catalogue.
- Few can still read the script. As fewer people learn Arwi, even located manuscripts risk becoming unreadable objects rather than usable texts — the knowledge inside them (medical, religious, poetic) becomes inaccessible even when the paper itself survives.
- No standardized digital infrastructure existed for a long time. Because Arwi uses extra characters beyond standard Arabic, ordinary Arabic fonts and keyboards cannot fully represent it, which historically made digitizing, typing, or searching Arwi text difficult.
Where Technology Is Starting to Help
The encouraging news is that this last problem is being actively worked on. Researchers — including scholars connected to Tamil Nadu institutions — have submitted formal proposals to the Unicode Consortium requesting dedicated Arwi character support, arguing that Arwi's extra letters and diacritics are not simply cosmetic variants of existing Arabic characters and deserve their own encoded representation. Related academic work has also produced custom Arwi fonts and even browser-based virtual keyboards that let users type Tamil and have it rendered in the Arwi script, reusing existing Arabic and Syriac Unicode blocks as a practical workaround while the fuller proposal is considered.
Separately, community-driven digitisation efforts — for instance, heritage libraries cataloguing Arabi-Malayalam material in Kerala — offer a working model for what Arwi preservation in Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu could look like at scale: systematic scanning, metadata tagging, and open online access, so that a manuscript's survival no longer depends on one family's storeroom staying dry.
Why This Matters — Even If You Don't Read a Word of It
It would be easy to file Arwi away as a curiosity — an obscure historical footnote. But it represents something larger: a thousand-year record of coexistence. It shows two civilizations, Arab and Tamil, meeting through commerce, intermarrying, worshipping together, healing each other, and building a shared script rather than one side simply overwriting the other's language. In an era where cultural narratives are often framed around conflict and difference, Arwi is quiet proof of the opposite — of communities that blended identities instead of erasing them, and did so peacefully enough that the results are still sung in villages today.
Losing the remaining Arwi manuscripts unread would mean losing:
- An irrecoverable record of regional Islamic scholarship as it was taught and understood locally, not imported wholesale.
- Centuries of devotional and literary poetry unique to Tamil Muslim culture.
- A botanical and medical knowledge base — local herbs, remedies, and treatment methods — that may have no other written record anywhere else.
- A linguistic snapshot of how Tamil sounded and was structured centuries before modern standardisation, since Arwi's phonetic spelling choices sometimes preserve older pronunciations.
The Road Ahead
Arwi's future will likely be shaped by three forces working in parallel:
- Digital preservation — Unicode standardisation, dedicated fonts, and searchable digital archives that make manuscripts accessible without requiring physical handling of fragile originals.
- Community and academic revival — universities and independent scholars keeping the script alive as a subject of study, even if it never returns to daily use.
- Cultural transmission — the continued, living tradition of Arwi poetry recitation at religious and cultural functions, which keeps the sound and spirit of Arwi alive even among those who cannot read its script.
The threats, meanwhile, are straightforward and familiar to anyone who has watched a minority tradition fade: an aging pool of readers with no successors, fragile paper manuscripts in poor storage conditions, a lack of institutional funding specifically earmarked for Arwi (as opposed to Tamil or Arabic more broadly), and simple unawareness — most people, including many within the communities whose heritage it is, have simply never heard of it.
That last threat is the one this article is aimed at. Awareness costs nothing, and it is often the first and most necessary step before funding, cataloguing, or digitisation efforts can even begin.
A Closing Thought
Arwi was never meant to be permanent in the way a national language is permanent — it was a practical bridge, built to solve a specific problem for a specific community across a specific stretch of ocean. That it survived over a thousand years, carrying scripture, poetry, and medicine along the way, says something about how durable a "temporary" solution can become when a community keeps choosing to use it, generation after generation.
Whether it survives another century likely depends less on linguists and more on ordinary families — deciding that the old manuscript in the loft is worth photographing before it is worth discarding.
If you have Arwi-scripted materials in your family's possession, consider having them photographed or scanned before they degrade further — even a phone photograph, properly dated and described, can become a valuable record for future researchers.
Sources consulted: BBC Travel ("Arwi: The lost language of the Arab-Tamils," 2024); Wikipedia's Arwi entry; academic research including studies published via the Borneo Journal of Language and Education, Think India Quarterly, and IIUC Studies; Unicode Consortium technical proposals (L2/2009 Arwi proposal); reporting by The News Minute, Marcellus, and the Ilankai Tamil Sangam; and background on Sri Lankan indigenous and Unani medicine from the University of Colombo's Faculty of Indigenous Medicine.
*AI assisted document
By: Mubarack Deen
Author is an experienced IT professional who served for a number of larger corporates in foreign countries, having led strategic IT projects and provided business solutions. Currently working as a self-employed business solutions provider, an enthusiast for bridging technology and business focusing on service improvements and growth.
Can be reached by email: m3de2n@gmail.com
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