Anthropological studies of the internet have traced the emergence of new forms of intimacy in various arenas of life, including friendship. Drawing upon an ethnography of Facebook and its use among young lower-middle-class men in Pune, Maharashtra, western India, the article investigates the discourse of friendship young men deploy on the platform. Although moulded in the image of their intimate friendships, their interactions with one another on-screen function to perform the ties of kinship. The distinctions young men draw between Facebook and their friendships off-screen reveal the particular forms male friendships take, the egalitarian ideal they contain, the privacy they require, and the care taken to foster them. Through examining the tensions between local articulations of intimacy and the publicity Facebook affords, I show how possibilities for online friendship, rather than being propelled by their freedom from external social conditions, are limited by the constraints of kinship. Frères, amis et ennemis : comment éviter l'intimité sur Facebook dans l'ouest de l'Inde Résumé Les études anthropologiques d'Internet ont repéré l’émergence de nouvelles formes d'intimité dans différents domaines de la vie, tels que l'amitié. À partir d'une ethnographie de Facebook et de son usage parmi les jeunes hommes de classe moyenne de Pune dans le Maharashtra, dans l'ouest de l'Inde, cet article examine le discours d'amitié déployés par ces jeunes gens sur la plate-forme. Bien qu'elles se calquent sur l'image de leurs amitiés proches, leurs interactions en ligne fonctionnent comme une performance de liens de parenté. Les distinctions qu'ils établissent entre Facebook et leurs amitiés hors ligne révèlent les formes particulières que prennent les amitiés masculines, l'idéal égalitaire qu'elles renferment, l'intimité qu'elles demandent et le soin mis à les entretenir. En examinant les tensions entre les formulations locales de l'intimité et la publicité offerte par Facebook, l'auteur montre comment, au lieu d’être stimulées par l'absence de contraintes sociales externes, les amitiés en ligne sont bridées par les contraintes des liens de parenté. In the summer of 2017, I was invited by Rakesh,1 one of my informants, to join him and a group of his childhood friends for a gathering in Manjri, a suburb situated on the outskirts of Pune on the Pune-Solapur highway. Rakesh was in his early twenties and in the final year of his undergraduate degree in computer science at a government college, though he was more likely to be found roaming the city in the company of friends than inside the classroom. Upon reaching our destination that evening, Rakesh led me to a shack where I was introduced to each of his friends through a short anecdote explaining the nicknames they were referred to by. ‘We call him shark, because he is dangerous!’, he said laughing. Introducing me to another young man, he referred to the Bollywood song ‘Pappu can't dance’: ‘This is pappu, but he can dance!’ Like many male friendship groups in Pune, the group's class composition was relatively homogeneous (in this case, all the men were from low-income, Hindu backgrounds) while diverse in terms of caste. As we headed into the shack to begin eating, Rakesh's friend Mahendra kept resisting the offering of food. When I asked him why he had not started eating, Rakesh interrupted: ‘He will not eat until his friend joins us. This is called mitra prem [brotherly love], true friendship!’2 When the friend in question finally arrived after numerous phone calls, the entire group erupted into a loud cheer and burst into applause, an act intended to celebrate his arrival as much as embarrass him. Their light-hearted mockery of his late entry conveyed their disregard for any justification he may have had for delaying the night's activities. As the evening finally culminated in the young men moving to an empty field to consume the last few remaining bottles of beer, I noticed one young man lying on the grass, resting his head on a friend's lap. Pointing to the inebriated man, Rakesh asked me: ‘Do people drink a lot in the UK? This guy I bet you drinks even more than them. He is a drunkard!’ The extent to which insults form the core of men's friendship activities features as a central theme in the writing on friendship between men, across cultural contexts. It reveals how male friendship operates within a particularly gendered framework in which humour is derived from making fun of one another (Evans 2010; Gregory 2006; McDiarmid, Gill, McLachlan & Ali 2017; Mechling 2004; Nayak & Kehily 2001). At the same time, however, there is an unmistakable sense of affection that characterizes the friendships of young men in Pune, from their demonstrations of physical closeness as described above to the inner emotions they pour out to each other in private. This article seeks to explain what it means to be a friend among young lower-middle-class men in Pune and the significant role that ideas and practices of friendship play in their everyday lives. In a manner similar to college-going boys in Kerala (Osella & Osella 1998: 191), these young men spent most of their time outside the house socializing in all-male groups. However, during my fieldwork, there was another activity that occupied a considerable portion of their daily routines: interacting with other youth on Facebook. A year into my fieldwork, India overtook the United States to become Facebook's largest market. The affordability of smartphones, combined with the recent availability of low-cost, high-speed 4G data plans, meant that the internet – which up until a few years prior figured only nominally in the lives of my informants – was now a constant presence, with Facebook in particular dominating their online usage. Despite its popularity, they were often ambivalent about the platform. Their cynicism towards the overtures of friendship that appeared on Facebook exemplifies a dialectic between privacy and publicity. The display of ‘converged audiences’ (Papacharissi 2013: 218) and their presence as witnesses to information within the networked architectures of online media run in tension against the spatialized practices and intimate exchanges that are fundamental to the making of friends. Rakesh, like many other young men I met in Pune, was an avid Facebook user, regularly scrolling on his phone to view his Facebook news feed, give ‘Likes’, and dedicate lengthy messages on his timeline to various Friends,3 the majority of whom were other young men in the city. However, these posts were noticeably devoid of the insults or humour that characterized his friendships off-screen. Distinguishing between dosti (friendship) and the version of friendship that was practised online, Rakesh explained: ‘Dosti is timepass’, referring to the activities of enacting mock fights, using profane language, chatting, joking, and roaming around aimlessly with friends. Elaborating, he pointed out: ‘Online, it is not about dosti. It is all about connections with friends’.4 Scholars have described the relationship between online and offline activity as entangled to varying degrees (Bonilla & Rosa 2015; Humphrey 2009; Ito 2005; Kendzior 2011; Miller & Slater 2000; B. Nardi 2010). Themes have included theorizations of the internet as ‘fundamentally embedded’ in everyday life (Miller & Slater 2000: 5), the interplay between face-to-face and digital interaction (B. Nardi 2010: 181), how being online has come to represent ‘the default’ (Ito 2005: 4), and how the internet produces practices that are separable from domestic life (Humphrey 2009: 46). This article re-examines this relationship by exploring how the widespread use of Facebook among young men in Pune is underscored by an ideological distinction between the platform and local understandings of friendship. Public expressions of friendship on Facebook, rather than being isolated from ordinary life, enact strategies that young men hope will enable them to claim material benefits offline, including access to resources and networks for achieving practical ends. Yet at the same time, Facebook brings into relief the tensions between the different social contexts in which youth subjectivities emerge, and as such is produced through a particular configuration of kin-like relations. The complex dynamics of Facebook friendships in Pune, simultaneously interwoven into everyday life and, in ideological terms, imagined as a different sort of relationship to that of friendship, require us to attend to how distinctions between the online and offline take on locally rooted meanings, in this case ideas about the relationship between friendship and kinship. While the popularity of social media has been attributed to the possibilities they afford for online friendships (Boyd 2014; Gershon 2010; Miller 2017), this article suggests that young men with already well-developed practices of friendship use Facebook to suit their own needs for improving social visibility, enhancing status, and lubricating their wider networks. The following discussion is based on twelve months of fieldwork in Pune between 2016 and 2018 which consisted of doing participant observation with college-going young men from low-income backgrounds aged between 18 and 25, both in face-to-face contexts and online. I compiled a collection of hundreds of items from young men's Facebook accounts, taking screenshots of selfies, posts, status updates, and comments. Participants were solicited through questionnaires, which I distributed at nine different colleges in the city, and the snowballing of personal contacts. While I hung out almost every day with groups of male friends, seven of my twelve core informants were studying at the same government college. My encounter with the very first group I met during my fieldwork, who coincidentally went on to form part of this core group, led me to befriend several other groups. The role of friendship and other kinds of intimacies in structuring relations enabled by new technologies is a recurring theme in the ethnographic literature, including studies of virtual worlds (Boellstorff 2008; Carter 2005), chat rooms (Baym 1995; Nisbett 2009; Tobin 1998), mobile phones (Archambault 2017; Chakraborty 2012; Habuchi 2005; Huang 2018), and social networking sites (Boyd 2014; Gershon 2010; Miller 2011). While Miller (2017: 388) has examined how the practice of adding Facebook Friends in an English village has led family members to incorporate the informality, humour, and voluntarism of friendship into their relations with one another, Boyd (2009: 31) discusses the social media that teenagers in the United States ‘perceive to be meant for them to congregate with their friends’. However, it seems that in Pune, local understandings of male friendship are neither transformed nor reproduced on Facebook, suggesting how digital technologies do not always necessarily provide spaces for forms of intimacy that the physical world constrains. Hence, this article challenges the view that digital technologies homogenize cultures as they spread globally by highlighting how very intimate and affectively charged male friendships in Pune are compartmentalized from Facebook, as well as how the trope of friendship is deployed on Facebook to produce a set of relations premised on publicity, hierarchy, and obligation. Despite remaining an understudied aspect of masculinity, an emerging body of research has shown friendship to contain specific meanings for young men in India, from rejecting generational and caste hierarchy to transgressing normative kinship (Desai 2010; Holtzman 2010; Jeffrey 2010; Kumar 2017; Lohokare 2016; Nakassis 2016; Nisbett 2009; Osella & Osella 1998). Whereas Way (2013) describes the reluctance of boys in the United States to express their intense desires for emotionally intimate male friendships as they enter late adolescence, young men in Pune had little reservations about conveying their attachments to one another, both on Facebook and off-screen. However, I suggest below that there appear to be two distinct uses of the word ‘friendship’ here: on the one hand, there is the friendship young men described to me in private as the love they harbour for close friends; on the other hand, there are the proclamations of friendship displayed across their Facebook timelines in which they turn other men into the brothers they must be careful about rather than into friends they love like brothers. Drawing attention to a ritual enacted during each other's birthdays on Facebook, I build upon Mauss's (1990 [1924]) theory of the gift and Appadurai's (1990) analysis of praise in Hindu culture to argue that Facebook becomes an arena in which public expressions of friendship are deliberately performed for a wider audience and designed to capitalize on their attention. The construction of Facebook as a domain of sociality separated from the interior world of friendship makes visible the nature of the relationship between close male friends; this includes how friendships temporarily subvert the social order, are set apart from kinship, and are conditioned by the relationship between public and private life. Through this I aim to reopen the question of friendship as an alternative basis for thinking about personhood distinct from caste and kinship (Desai 2010; Froerer 2010; Osella & Osella 1998), with the added suggestion that the sentiment of male friendship among young men in Pune is modelled more closely on romantic love than the bonds of brotherhood. Echoing Kolenda's (1990: 144) observation about romance in North India that ‘out of the tomfoolery comes prem or pyar, affection and love’, young men develop intimacy with their closest male friends through practices of joking and suspending status differences. Paralleling Mains’ (2013: 344) finding that ‘themes of tension and love between friends rarely filter into young men's day-to-day conversations’ in Ethiopia, young male Punekars5 seldom verbally express their love for their close friends in person. Through insult speech, described by young men as teasing – the words chutiya (fool) and faltu (useless), alongside more profane terms such as bhenchod (sisterfucker) and matharchod (motherfucker) are frequently tossed around – they play out performances of mockery and status-levelling that produce each other as equals. As Chopra (2004: 55), in her study of rural Punjab, observes, young men's practices of occupying the street functioned to develop egalitarian relations with male friends in ways that challenged the hierarchical masculine relations they encountered at home. At the same time, young men in Pune frequently demonstrated their affection physically, for instance by wrapping an arm around their friend's shoulder to clasp their hand, stamping on their foot, putting them in a headlock, playfully pinching their shoulders, and even trying to burn them with a matchstick. Just as homosocial tactility is constitutive of sociality between non-English-speaking Bengali men (Chatterjee 2014: 173), likewise, the masculinity of lower-middle-class young men in Pune is neither threatened by the act of holding hands or ruffling each other's hair nor challenged by recognizing each other's physical attractiveness. They regularly teased (but rarely directly complimented) each other about their good looks. Rakesh, for example, was repeatedly referred to by his friends as ‘chocolate boy’ for his boyish features and snaggle-toothed grin. Such displays of physical intimacy between male friends are rooted in an aesthetics of masculine sociality in India, which, as Osella and Osella (2006: 187) argue, is emblematic of how ‘young men's tentative (and illicit, difficult) relationships with young women lack the substance of their relationships with each other’. On evenings when I joined young men for dinner, I noticed them sharing each other's food, eating from the same plate, and even using their hands to mix each other's daal and rice, consequently erasing any boundaries that separated one's own meal from the other. This last point resonates with the discussion on how practices of sharing, in suspending caste ideas of pollution, are central to the egalitarian spirit of friendship between men in India (Jeffrey 2010: 94; Nisbett 2009: 84; Osella & Osella 1998: 191). I suggest below that the evasion of young men towards challenging hierarchy on Facebook due to the inability to exchange physical objects and touch marks out utterances of friendship on the platform as distinct from intimate friendship. On Facebook, declarations of closeness, rather than insults, punctuate young men's posts about each other. The distinct frame of interaction that Facebook produces between young men is evident from how seemingly innocuous displays of playful aggression found in teasing become problematic on the platform. As Rakesh put it bluntly: ‘What is posted versus what is not posted is determined by family … sanskar [respectable]. Here, other friends of the boy I am teasing might see this and get upset, thinking that I am insulting him. They will take offence’. Young men were more worried about those who were spectators to their interactions online than they were about the recipients of their posts. Teasing off-screen was contingent on the intimacy between the parties to the exchange, as Nikhil, a close friend and classmate of Rakesh's, told me during a trip we had taken together with a large group of young men from his college: ‘I can tease my close friends, but if I do the same to some of the others on this trip who I am not close to, they will punch me’. On Facebook, however, even close friends could not be teased for fear of inciting hostility from the recipient's Friends. On Facebook, the intrusion of those from beyond the immediate peer group is no longer temporary but made permanent through what Boyd (2014: 61) describes as ‘the dynamics of mediated social situations – including invisible audiences, collapsed contexts, and persistent content’. Young men were aware that their Facebook posts were visible to anyone they were connected to on the platform. In this way, Facebook challenges the privacy of male friendship much in the same way that the crowded space of the family home does where young men live with their parents, siblings, and sometimes even the spouses and children of married elder brothers, often in cramped conditions. Writing about joint-family living in Banaras, Derné (1995: 96) notes: ‘[Y]oung men must be constantly attuned to the demands, expectations, and judgments of family elders’. For my informants, their practices of friendship rarely occur at home, unfolding instead across public spaces in the city such as tea stalls, street corners, and college campuses and revolving around motorbike rides in which two, three, or even four friends, with their bodies pressed together on one seat, engage in the joint pursuit of the pleasure to roam freely around the city. The crucial role that privacy plays in facilitating intimacy between young men in Pune relates not only to the use of profane language and physical touch, but also to secrets. Acts of teasing are structured by a common trope of highlighting each other's involvement in illicit activities, from secret romantic trysts to drinking alcohol.6 On numerous occasions, they would jokingly label each other as ‘dangerous’; when I asked what this meant, Rakesh replied: ‘We do not actually mean danger, but it means he has some friends and lots of contacts who are the mafia type (gundagiri)’. During the evening in Manjri described in the opening fieldwork vignette, Rakesh was teased about being caught by another friend at a hotel where he had booked a room for meeting a woman in private. The secrecy of Rakesh's relationship was typical of those among my informants. Pre-marital relationships were kept hidden from parents in the knowledge of their likely disapproval; young men often told me that they expected to have their marriages arranged and conducted relationships in secret by booking hotel rooms for more intimate encounters. By openly joking, celebrating, and discussing each other's romantic exploits, they challenge societal norms around caste boundaries and religious restrictions that dictate marriage and kinship arrangements (Abraham 2001: 150). For instance, many of their romantic relationships involve partners from different caste or religious backgrounds. While the hierarchy of parent-son and fraternal relations prevents young men from discussing their private secrets with their families, the spaces of trust that the close friendship circle provides enable them to explore aspects of the self not encompassed within the duties of kinship. The acts of participating together in flouting societal norms and sharing secrets about their transgressions – or what they would describe as masti (mischief or mischievous activity)7 – are central to what it means to be a friend. The unique role masti offers for them to briefly challenge the hierarchies of caste and kinship becomes particularly noticeable upon considering how they refrain from masti on Facebook. Here, their celebrations of friendship entail a very different kind of theory of power, one that involves building up the image of each other and lending their respective audiences. If you are scrolling and scrolling, ‘liking’ a friend's picture, then scrolling, then ‘liking’ another picture, that is a waste of time. It is not the same as caring for a friend. Bad people will say all the good things to you, but good friends will show their concern. They will say things you don't want to hear, but it is because they care. In another conversation, Rakesh stressed that the common practice of complimenting Facebook Friends stood in contrast to how criticizing close friends out of concern was part of what it meant to be a genuine friend: ‘People here will post all sorts of things. But if I post something bad online, my real friends will tell me the truth. They will say “this is not good”’. The common reflection that what was posted on Facebook was determined by whether it was sanskar – a term that connotes not just respectability but also the responsibilities and duties one inherits by virtue of one's familial upbringing (Lohokare 2016: 123; Roland 1992: 132) – signals how Facebook is perceived by young men as if it is a space of kinship, despite their Facebook audience primarily consisting of other young men. Following Gershon's (2010: 3) argument that people's beliefs about communicative technologies determine their usage, young men's awareness of the visibility of their posts on Facebook shapes how they approach the platform. Not only do they refrain from posting about their transgressions much in the way they hide these aspects of themselves from family members, but they also mobilize their networks of Facebook Friends to bring into effect what Dumont (1983) calls the principle of alliance between same-sex members in Indian kinship. On Facebook, it is usually all about showing off, saying ‘look at me’. So when we post a picture of someone else on our Facebook timeline, this is a very big thing in Pune. It is seen as a big deal. You see, if you put my photo on your page and wish me happy birthday, I will think that there is a special place in your heart for me. But people won't put just anyone's face on their Facebook page. They only do these things for those who have a big bank balance, or a big social circle, or are big people in society, those who have a lot of value. The significance of this style of celebrating birthdays is that, rather than an act of intimacy or care, it functions as a kind of gift-giving that seeks to nurture the bond of alliance (Mauss 1990 [1924]). By posting on their own timelines and news feeds, young men's birthday wishes are not merely seen by the celebrant alone; they are also circulated across a wider audience, one that the birthday celebrant otherwise does not have access to. What is posted as a status update will, based on Facebook's algorithm, end up appearing on a selection of Friends’ news feeds, providing a broad audience to witness one's post (Gershon 2010: 65). In this case, it enables young men to broadcast their praise of the birthday celebrant, effectively introducing the celebrant to their own audience. Through gifting the temporary attention of their Friends, young men produce what Cross (2012: 22) calls an economy of allegiance ‘within which people could be expected to be reciprocated over time’. My dear friend and the king in the world of friendship, The pride of the city, young, able, visionary, intelligent, strong, The one who would do anything, anywhere, anytime, any place for friendship, The one who spends money for his friends wholeheartedly, The one who, when amongst his friends, pays more attention to them than his mobile phone, Someone who is happy go lucky, jovial and does not get irritated with his friends, This special friend who is always with us in our joys and sorrows To this friend, we wish lots of good wishes on his birthday, This is our humble request to god that may he bless with you with a long life and great success. How many stars in the sky But no one is like the moon . . . How many faces on the ground But no one like my friend . . . *#HaPpy__B'daY__ * #my brother is dearer than my life #he is the true king in the world of friendship #the royal man deserves a royal birthday wish #live long, be successful, every day of your life belongs to you #every happy moment of your life, I'll be behind you #in your bad times, don't look behind, I'll be there in front of you. Explaining the motivations behind sending birthday wishes on Facebook in such a deliberately public manner, Deepak, a young man from rural Maharashtra who had moved to Pune to juggle his college studies with a job as a domestic helper, told me: ‘When people wish their Friends happy birthday on their own walls, it is because they want everyone else to see how close they are. By doing this, they feel that they can increase the love that exists with their Friend’. It is because they want something from that person. It might be money, or it might be something in the future. Childhood friends will not be doing all this to each other. But people who have known each other for maybe two or three years, they especially will do this on Facebook. Furthermore, the publicity of the act stems not only from its mode of exchange, but also from the very aspects of themselves that young men are exchanging. Unlike the secrets close friends entrust each other with, the birthday post deploys a language of friendly or intimate expression which forms part of a larger repertoire of status-raising. According to Appadurai (1990: 102, original emphasis), ‘[P]raise is not a matter of direct communication between the inner emotional states of the parties involved but of a publicly understood code for the negotiation of expectations and obligations’. The ritual of showering Facebook Friends with compliments stands in contrast to how young men's intimate friendships are rarely declared but instead built through the kinds of things one can say or do. With close friends, they ‘circulate emotional strain, suffering, and complaints without fear of rebuke or humiliation’ (Papataxiarchis 1991: 172). Whereas friendship itself forms the object of attention in the birthday post, the emphasis among my informants on the physical and emotional freedoms their close friendships provide demonstrates, according to C.S. Lewis (1993: 42), how ‘those pathetic people who simply “want friends” can never make any … the very condition of having Friends is that we should want something else besides Friends’. Recurring throughout our conversations were descriptions of friendship as an invisible bond that could not be seen or heard but only felt. Rakesh and Nikhil both told me in private, on separate occasions, that friendship conjured the image of ‘two souls in one body’. This conception of friendship can be found in the classical Hindu myths as well other regional oral epics about the Maratha warrior king Shivaji Maharaj. For example, Peter Nardi (1999: 14) points out how descriptions in the Mahabharata depict Krishna and Arjuna's friendship as ‘one self that has been made twofold’. Young men regularly draw on this lore to explain the principles they abide by, the inspiration they seek to cope with difficult periods in their lives, and the meaning they assign to friendship. Nikhil once recounted to me a story about Shivaji's brother: ‘He was captured and tortured very badly, but his best friend said “whatever you do to him, you do to me as well”. That is true friendship’. Describing the emotional intimacy of friendship, Virat remarked: ‘If we are talking with each other, we can feel what is in each other's heart. We can be laughing, disturbing someone for timepass, displaying our anger, shouting … all of this is called enjoying.’ The significance attached to the mutual disclosure of private aspects of the self within friendship resonates with Way's (2013: 201) observation of how young boys describe their best friends as people with whom they share their deepest secrets. For Rakesh, the exchange of inner emotions that close male friendships afforded was impossible to reproduce on Facebook: ‘We cannot high five or show our anger, love or full emotion towards our friends online. That is why this [gesturing with his finger pointing downwards to indicate life outside the smartphone screen] is true friendship’. While friendship has typically been theorized within anthropology in terms of kinship, the distinctions that emerge between young men's interactions on Facebook and their intimate friendships off-screen point to an understanding of what friendship does differently to kinship. The boundaries young men maintain between what they can and cannot do on Facebo