Shihab Ghanem's bonds of relations with India go back to his student life in India and perhaps beyond that during his grandfather's period. He, while speaking to Saudi Gazette, recalled: "When Mahatma Gandhi was on his way to London to attend the Round Table Conference, the ship carrying him anchored at Aden port. The British authorities didn't want Gandhi to land in Aden and meet prominent figures there. Therefore, A boat took them to meet him on board the ship. My grandfather Mohammed Ali Luqman jumped to the boat, showing his passionate fervor. Subsequently, Luqman was highly influenced by Gandhi and he started the first newspaper in Yemen. Ghanem decided to go to Bombay University to do his graduation. Another strong relation with India was that when I went to do my master's degree from Roorkee University, which was considered at that time the topmost university for engineering in India and later became an IIT. I developed real relationship with Keralites when I was honored along with a leading Indian poet Kamala Das and lyricist and music director Yousafali Kecheri at a function in Dubai in 1996. At that function, she was wearing Abaya and I asked whether she is a Muslim but she said she is Hindu. Later, she reverted to Islam and changed her name to Kamala Surayya. I translated Kamala Surayya's Ya Allah, an anthology of 40 poems on her experiments with reverting to Islam, into Arabic with the name of Raneen Al-Surayya (Surayya's melodies). This work brought me Dubai Innovation Award. Later I was invited to Oman to attend a function along with her son and eminent journalist M.D Nalappad. I translated English poetry of K. Satchidanandan, former editor of Indian Literature journal and the former secretary of Kendra Sahitya Akademi, into Arabic. With this, I got admiration from many people. Eventually, many Malayali writers and poets in UAE came to visit me. The consul general of India in Dubai issued a book about relationship between India and UAE. He described me as the cultural ambassador of India in the Arab world. I established close relationship with many prominent Malayali poets and started compiling many of their works. My first English book on Indian literature was "Poems from Kerala". It evoked tremendous response. I invited Satchidanandan to the book fair in Abu Dhabi, and I translated his poems and he translated my poems. Then, came Kadamanitta Ramakrishnan. I went to India to invite poets as advisor to the director of the Abu Dhabi cultural organization to attend the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair. Then, I translated many great Indian poems, especially those from Malayalam. These included poems of Surayya, Sugatha Kumari (Matarullail), Chemmanam Chacko, ONV Kurup, KG Shankara Pillai, Yousafali Kecheri, Ayypa Panicker, Balachandran Chullikkad and many others. Subsequently, people of Kerala also started translating my poems. An anthology of my poems was translated by a number of Malayali writers and it was edited by Satchidananthan. M.N. Karasseri, Sarju, Usha, Kaleem, and Shihabuddin Poithumkadav are some other translators of my works. I also translated famous Indian Hindu religious leader and philosopher Sri Narayana Guru's "DyavaDashakam" into Arabic.
