Building cosmopolitan amity in inter-faith, cross-cultural friendships in imperial contact zones: 'difficult conversations' between Indian and British women of faith 1880 to 1940. .

In this paper I focus on friendship as a continuum or range of affective relationships that were spaces for contestation, resistance and praxes of anti-colonialism and cosmopolitanism much as Leela Gandhi describes  (2004). I consider case studies of women involved in advocacy networks that were transnational, cross cultural and faith based. I ask how they built  webs of collegiality and friendship  that articulated specific faith based cosmopolitan visions  that  engaged with new  post-empire  vocabularies  of commonwealth.  What difficult conversations were involved and how were these negotiated? What and how were tensions between universal ideas and the particularities of identity expressed? What were the politics of friendship that formed the underpinning of cosmopolitan collaboration?  I compare the politics of friendship discernible from the remnant texts these women bequeathed us to argue that a different model emerges of friendship and cosmopolitanism to that put forward by Michael Clark in his study of Tagore, W. B. Yeats, C. F. Andrews and E. C. Thompson (2012). Rather than the egocentric elitist and reactionary phenomenon Clark identifies, I suggest the examples of these women of faith reveal a politics of friendship fraught with difficult conversations but none the less expressive of “cosmopolitan thought zones” (Manjapra, 2010) that flow not from “abstract reason, but from the fertile ground of local knowledge and learning …”(Bose 2010 97).