Languages on Friendship:
On Sakhi  

Almost all Indian languages have a tendency to slip past neat definitions. Words, phrases, idioms, metaphors, and even sentences work at more than one level. To understand this, let us delve into the word sakhi. 

Borrowed from Sanskrit into Urdu, the word written as سکھی can mean a friend, a companion, or someone close. The word written as سخی comes from Arabic, meaning generous and bountiful. Though both words have distinct sounds based on the pronunciation of their letters, over the years, the distinction has vanished in speech. What remains is a word that feels open, full of meaning, and yet elusive. Moreover, the original words coexist in such a way that the Arabic sakhi eventually becomes a function of the Sanskrit sakhi: my companion is generous. 

Sakhi also does something else that English struggles with — it refuses to declare gender. Sakhi-saheli, in colloquial usage, might make us assume that sakhi means a female friend. But through Urdu poetry, we come to understand that this term embodies multiplicity. You can call a man sakhi, you can call a woman sakhi, and you can even use it in a tone that hovers between affection and admiration. More importantly, sakhi is also the reader, the one who listens to the poem, the one being addressed by the lover. A sakhi, in that way, is generous in listening to the sufferings of a friend — the poet. 

Amir Khusrau, the 13th-century Sufi poet and singer, in his famous multilingual ghazal, “Ze-haal-e-miskin makun taghaful durae nainan banae batiyan” which blends Persian with Braj Bhasha, a literary language that later became an important influence on Hindustani traditions, including Urdu, says: “Sakhi piyā ko jo maiñ na dekhūñ to kaise kāTūñ añdherī ratiyāñ.”

In English, this line could be translated as: “Oh beloved/friend (sakhi), if I do not see my beloved, how will I survive dark nights?” 

When read out loud, it could also mean: “If I do not see my generous (sakhi) beloved, how shall I pass these dark nights?” 

Or: “If I don’t see my sakhi (beloved) piya (object of love/affection), how will I survive dark nights?”

Is Khusrau addressing a female friend? A male beloved? A confidant? The word doesn’t rush to clarify. The language trusts you to make sense of it. 

Sometimes, meanings fold into each other. A sakhi might be the friend who stays up all night listening to your worries, and also the person whose presence feels like a quiet kind of love. Not necessarily romantic in the obvious sense, but not entirely outside it either. It is an overlap that Indian languages are comfortable with. 

In the Natyashastra, the ancient Sanskrit treatise on drama, the sakhi is an archetypal character who acts as a messenger between the nayaka and nayika, the male and female protagonists respectively. The sakhi is most often the nayika’s closest confidante and intimate listener. She hears the nayika’s love lore with the nayaka — secrets are told, complaints are made, love is confessed. Eventually, she becomes a vessel for the love and desire between the protagonists. She is not quite inside the love story, but not outside it either. The demarcation between the sakhi and the nayaka becomes so blurred that one cannot clearly determine whether the desire is shared between the nayaka and the nayika, or the nayika and the sakhi. 

English, by contrast, prefers separation. “Friend” sits on one side, “lover” on another, and “generous” lies somewhere else entirely. Each version is accurate, and yet each trims away a possibility. The original word has room for both — a closeness that does not need to declare its exact boundaries. 

Even in everyday speech, this fluidity shows up. A grandmother might call her grandson sakhi while praising his kind nature. Two women might use it teasingly for each other, somewhere between friendship and affection. There is something quietly radical in this word: it is emotionally flexible and semantically layered. It does not force the speaker to decide too quickly what a relationship is. It simply offers a space where meanings coexist. 

The tiny difference between سخی and سکھی, almost invisible in speech but fully present in script, also echoes a slipperiness where translation becomes less about finding the “right” word and more about noticing what resists being pinned down. These are playful linguistic puzzles. 

So when you hear sakhi, do not rush to translate it. Let it remain slightly unresolved. After all, some relationships are like that too — not easily named, but deeply understood and intimate.