In a whole host of Persian textual forms, the figure of the friend is ubiquitous. The friend sometimes renders the text possible, either by requesting or inspiring its writing. In other cases, texts offer anecdotes of friends who give or receive information, often authorizing the author. More than just dialogues over aesthetics, commemorative texts articulate social worlds undergoing upheaval in the 18th-century, in the aftermath of Safavid and Mughal empires. I focus on two widely read and reproduced texts written in the 1760s, Azad Bilgrami’s Khizanah-yi ‘amirah (Deccan) and Azar Baygdili’s Atashkadah (Iraq- ‘ajam), against the background of other tazkirahs produced in the late 18th century. Friendship and its social practices were crucial for the way Persianate community could be commemorated and these texts illuminate the possibilities and limitations for a transregional social imaginary undergoing political and social reconstitution. Various regions of Iran and India experienced the mid-late 18th century in different ways that impacted their relationship with other regions. I look at how social ties enacted in companionship and correspondence resulted in different kinds of commemorative texts, constituting divergent views of the Persianate world, based on what forms of sociality were possible. How was the awareness and coherence of a transregional poetic community affected by the fall of Mughal and Safavid empires? What happened to the production and circulation of texts, people, and ideas and what became of the transregional social imaginary? In other words, how do we historicize the Persianate, its limits and possibilities, in the 18th century? This paper outlines how forms of commemorating the social provide new insights into the meaning of how Persians in and between Iran and India experienced political changes. This approach allows us think about the relation of political and material circumstances to representational possibilities and aesthetic affiliations in terms of reconfiguration of the transregional circulation in the turbulent period between empires.