Both E.M. Forster and Rudyard Kipling in their major Indian novels, A Passage to India and Kim, valorised friendship across the imperial and racial divide. In this comparative and contrapuntal study of these classic novels about India, I attempt to see how they negotiate the complications caused in personal relationships by haughty imperial attitudes on the one hand, and resistant nationalism on the other. Another dimension underlying the personal relationships in these narratives is that of sexual politics in instances where friendship leads to intimacy with dramatic consequences. The opposite of this perhaps is an attempt to sublimate the personal and the empirical into the spiritual, a trend evidenced in different ways in both. Finally, I refer to the work done on Forster and Kipling by a few other Indian scholars, to see how they engage with the issues outlined here.