Practicing Friendship: Epistolary constructions of social intimacy in the bahmani sultanate

Abstract

This article considers epistolary friendships in the fifteenth-century Bahmani Sultanate. Focusing on letters written by the Bahmani Vizier, Mahmud Gavan, to distant friends in other parts of the Persianate world, including the Timurid Sufi-poet Jami, I examine how friendship could be constituted through the practice of letter-writing. I argue that despite common assumptions about the rule-bound and formulaic nature of the genre of insha (letter-writing), correspondents could subtly mobilize the generic rules to conjure up unique and potent metaphorical declarations of friendship. Second, I argue that the dense semiotic field created by the recurrent use of similar images and chains of metaphors to symbolize friendship in letters reified certain practices as constitutive of friendship, and thus actually contributed to friendship practices in the 'real' world. Finally, I suggest that the metaphorical language used in insha is not merely an ornamental flourish, but actually an attempt to constitute an alternative reality: By writing to each other in terms which evoked the friendship practices of physically proximate friends, two friends separated by distance could metaphorically undertake those practices together.