What is the difference between Arabic and Indian writing?

If by “Indian writing” you mean Urdu, then yes it is very similar. Hindi (I’m not 100% sure of the name, something like that…It’s the one that looks like it has a line constantly going thru it)isn’t really similar to those, though.

Hindi and Bengali are similiar and Urdu and Arabic are similiar. As you can see, Arabic and Hindi look nothing alike.
Hope his helps : )

what about Punjabi? :)

Most Indian scripts, like Devanagari, Gurmukhi, Bengali, Tamil etc are descended from the Brahmi script. The Arabic script is not related.

Arabic and Urdu are both from the Semitic language family, unlike Hindi, Gujarati, and other “native” Indian languages. Urdu arrived on the Indian subcontinent with the migration of Semitic peoples. Although the script does not look similar, Arabic and Urdu also share profound similarities with Hebrew, Aramaic (now spoken sparsely across the Middle East), and Amharic (in Ethiopia).

Punjabi script is very similar to Hindi script.

Arabic and Urdu both use Arabic alphabet (Urdu has 10 more unique one then Arabic). Interestingly Urdu came about as a language spoken in the Army camps of the Moghul Empire and is a blend of Arabic, Turkish and Farsi (Persian). Due to Muslim rule of India for over 6–8 hundred years in varying degree Hindi and Urdu are very similar, but have different names probably for nationalistic reasons. Also as far as Punjabi is concerned… Punjab is a region on the border of India and Pakistan. It’s population was both Hindu and Muslim yet spoke the same language. Upon partition in 1947 the prodominantly Muslim area (western Punjab) went to Pakistan and the mainly Sikh/Hindu to India. Today Punjabi in written in Urdu, Hindi and possibly a few other scripts.

@quarkquarkquark Urdu is not a Semitic language. It’s an Indic language, like Hindi, Gujarati, Punjabi, etc.

Urdu uses a variant of the Perso-Arabic script called Nastaʿlīq. The script used for Punjabi is called Gurmukhi. The script used for Hindi is called Devanāgarī.

Most the scripts used in south Asia are derived from the Brahmi script. Brahmi is also the source of most scripts of southeast Asia, including Thai, Lao, and Khmer.