South Asian historians rarely engage in cross-temporal conversations across the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial divide. We understand this scholarly lacuna to be a legacy of colonial historiography and history. Hence, our panel bridges the temporal and historiographical gap by looking at how various forms of homosociality transformed with changing patterns of socialization, domesticity, education, religious practice, and so on over a longue duree.

The four papers of our panel examine different regions of South Asia - from Rajputana, Deccan, Punjab, to Bengal, as we explore connections in intimate homosocialities across these diverse spaces historically. The first paper studies the implications of friendships forged vertically between local chieftains and elite officials in the seventeenth century Mughal Empire. How forms of intimacies based on diplomatic relations transformed structures of power and tied the Empire with its local bodies on an affectual plane is what the paper explores. The second paper begins by historicizing Brahman heteronormativity across the seventeenth and eighteenth century Deccan. It highlights how the Peshwa regime regulated non-conformimg Brahman comportment as embodied by the 'missing' Mahānubhāvs, and invested in creating a decidedly homosocial community of professional biographers. The author argues that this community, imbricated with 'the Brahman Raj,' produced and popularized a specific heteronormative model of sexual comportment using the popular language of bhakti, thereby shaping the contours of acceptable sociality in caste entrenched Hinduism. The third paper questions conventional notions of race and class by exploring the relations between queens of princely states with their European governesses in late colonial South Asia. Reading letters and memoirs which reify the space of female friendships, the paper unpacks deep cross-cultural intimacies which disrupts the ‘mistress-maid’ binary. The final paper of the panel demonstrates how popular culture constitutes ideas of friendship. A close reading of two Bengali movies from the nineteen seventies highlight the role of the elder brother in not only creating spaces of male bonding but also reconfiguring ideas of civility and reinforcing middle-class stereotypes. Taken together, the panel seeks to understand how homosociality informs aspects of empire, caste, race, community, and interpersonal relationships from precolonial to postcolonial South Asia.