This paper focuses on the eighteenth-century Persian and Urdu language mahfil-i musha’irah (poetry gathering or salon). Mughal India’s Persian-educated urban elite patronized and documented this socio-literary institution beginning in the sixteenth century. The Persianate salon space privileges sociability or sohbat above all else through forms of speech (sukhan) and bodily comportment (adab). From this position, we find that the presumed hierarchy between Persian as an elite language and Urdu as a vernacular is ambivalently expressed in the salon space during the eighteenth century, a moment of significant literary change. In this paper, I show that the salon’s space informed period conceptions of literary historiography that disrupt conventions on language hierarchy and class. From the Balkans to Bengal, much literary history of Islamicate societies written after the nationalist era has sidelined the relational, embodied, and behavioral aspects that informed Islamicate intellectual pursuits in pre-modern times. Of late, some scholars have reassessed early modern Islamicate text genres and institutions to foreground socio-textual practices holistically—in other words what texts do with people and their bodies. The text genre par excellence in the salon setting was the tazkirah or biographical compendium. Eighteenth-century compendia document the bodily, aesthetic, and hierarchical aspects of courtly and extra-courtly gatherings through verse, cursory biographies, and anecdotes. In short, the tazkirah represents salon-based conceptions of sociability or sohbat at a particular point in time. The work of Marcia Hermansen, Francesca Orsini, Tayab al-Hibri, and Robert McChesney represent contemporary theorization on the tazkirah as an Islamicate text genre. Expanding on their approaches, this paper examines the 1740s in the Mughal capital of Delhi, a watershed decade for poetry exchange and criticism. This epoch bridged several generations of India-based poets who were advancing the tazah or “fresh” goals of contemporary Persian writing and who were also recasting Persophone civility according to vernacular sensibilities at the center of early modern Persianate literary production. The salons of Delhi and their documentation produced histories of literary sociability which force us to reconsider hierarchical relationships between dominant languages and vernaculars from a stance that foregrounds disciplined bodies and polite speech.