OMAN-INDIA TIES, ACROSS SEA AND SPACE

The coastal contacts between Oman and India are not only based on a rich maritime trade tradition but its associated cultural, social and linguistic links.

Spanning over four millennia, the constant and regular contact of communities on both sides of the Arabian Sea have provided a rich cross fertilization of knowledge in science, astronomy and religion, as well as innumerable and unmeasurable non-material cultural artefacts in the form of oral narratives, songs, folk tales and children’s stories. Material influences include monetary modes of exchange like coins as well as objects such as doors, treasure boxes (mandoos) and jewellery. These links are also manifested in everyday lives through cultural markers like clothing, culinary choices, architecture, loan words, as well as contemporary popular culture in the form of films, television series and music bands.

Scientific influences The Arabs of antiquity were in close contact with, and influenced by, Indian civilization. They travelled and had access to the ancient Indian scholarly traditions1. Scholars who studied in Indian institutions included mathematicians, philosophers, and physicians like Al Hareth bin Kalda Al Thaqafi, who had studied along with Indian scholars at Gundeshapur in the Sassanid Empire in modern Iran. Books were frequently exchanged between Arabs and Indians, with the Abbassid Caliph Al Mansour being one of the most important Arab recipients of works of mathematics and medicine written in India. One of the most important works, which travelled in this way, was Aryabhatta’s decimal system, which was eventually received by the Europeans through the Arabs.

Zikrur Rahman, Director of the India Arab Cultural Centre at the Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi, observes that there was a rich literary tradition between India and the Arab world, particularly through many Indian translations of Arab writers like Al Razi, Ibn Sina and Jubran Khalil Jubran. He added that “Arab-Indian communication was not confined to literary and creative exchange, but surpassed it to spreading religious thought and enlightenment in India, which resulted primarily from the translated works of Arab scholars and thinkers such as Jamal Edeen al Afghani and Muhammad Abduh”2.

The Umayyad Caliph Hisham bin Abdel Malik initiated the translation of a number of works from Sanskrit to Arabic, which included a major work on astronomy and mathematics, Brāhmasphuṭasiddhānta which was translated under the title Sindhind by Mohammed Fazari. In the Abbasid period the translation of Sanskrit books on science, astronomy and law, as well as art and literature was very common. In fact, the famous Indian Islamic scholar and author Qazi Athar Mubarakpuri quotes several Hadiths which say that 1 Arab Centre for Research and Policy Studies. (2018). ‘Indo-Arab relations’.

2 Sheikh Zayed Book Award (2009), ‘Sheikh Zayed book award hold the ‘Indo-Arab’ cultural relations seminar at the London book fair.

115