The first two papers on our panel centres around ideas of intimacy and proximity in the elite circles in early modern South Asia. The first paper examines the importance of companionship and service in the historical writing of Bakhtāwar Khān, a eunuch at the Mughal court. By exploring assertions of the self, this panelist examines the author’s status as a castrated person and relationships with other men, allowing us to rethink the very definitions of being male. The second paper considers gift and letter exchanges between men situated in geographically disparate places, raising the question of what the language of dissatisfaction and practice of returning gifts can tell us about the distinctly public practice of Persian correspondence in the sixteenth century. In this paper, elite male friendship is read at this intersection of courtly culture, material objects, and the written word. The latter two papers shift to the context of colonial India. The paper by the third panelist continues the discussion of male intimacies mediated through items of consumption by studying the “dens” of youth activity (in)famous for leisurely bonding over intoxicants. The paper fractures ideas of a monolithic masculine space by undercutting it with questions of class, caste, and economic hierarchies. The final paper of the panel focuses on friendship and forms of intimacy outside the contours of the family, calling into question the extent to which kinship and blood relations are often assumed to be natural. Specifically, the paper looks at the investments on the kinship term of the elder brother in colonial-era memoirs from Bengal. Friendships emerge out of such seemingly kinship invocations but have distinct habitations of their own in places such as anticolonial struggle or literary circles. Altogether, the papers in our panel take male intimacy as an entry point to probe aspects of material culture, modes of sociality and institutional organization, kinship relations, and histories of sexuality and desire.