The geographical and institutional locations of modern European scholarly practice are well known. Largely unknown and scarcely acknowledged are those practices of non-European historians, archaeologists, philosophers, critics, and philologists. Reading and engaging their work reveals histories of Arab thought distinct from those which have been narrated simply in relation to European knowledge and colonial depositories. By adjusting the sources from which modern Arab history is customarly produced, both the kind of materials and their location, the Arab world’s place in global intellectual history generally and the history of the global south in particular, becomes ever clearer. This paper accounts for one south-south intellectual encounter by following the anti-colonial poet, lawyer and translator Wadi’ al-Bustani (1888-1954), as he moved from Mount Lebanon to Cairo, Hudaydah, Bombay, Transvaal, and finally Haifa. Along with essays on Indian culture and translations of Rabindranath Tagore’s poetry and plays, Bustani spent decades translating and annotating Arabic renditions of the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, and Kalidasa’s Shakuntala. In 1947 he told an interviewer who had asked him why he had undertaken this task, that “the translations of India’s epics into European languages opened new doors in fiqh al-lugha, al-philologiyya. Today, if you look at any comprehensive English language dictionary you will see that many English words have their origins in Sanskrit. If we translate these texts into the Arabic language we will notice the same thing.” Bustani’s translations of and commentaries on these Indic texts and the philological project he saw himself a part of, speak to the new forms of knowledge that circulated in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on the traces of Bustani’s life and work in the British, Israeli, and Indian archives, as well as his family’s personal papers in Lebanon, this paper demonstrates his place in the politics and literature of the Eastern Mediterranean and within an intellectual history that stretched across the Indian Ocean, and finally, the globe.