What were the implications of consensual plagiarism among Persian writers in the early modern period? How did one navigate the politics of keeping poetic diaries in literary society? What forms of history writing emerged from this context? In assessing these issues, this presentation considers a text shared between Ghulam Hamadani Mushafi (1751-1824) and Muhammad Hasan Qatil (1757/8-1818), two eighteenth-century Persian-educated literati writing in late Mughal India. In spite of the Mughal throne’s fracturing power, India's Persianate public sphere continued to incubate among regional courts a productive ferment of debates on appropriate language, local influence, and vernacular literary style, all controversial topics that broke friendships and birthed new enmities among the semi-elites of the wider Persian-educated world. Both Qatil and Mushafi grew prominent in this setting, but as friendly competitors: Mushafi became a celebrated poet in the salons of Lucknow, writing eight divans in Rekhtah—the Persianized vernacular today known as Urdu—and Qatil, a Hindu convert to Shi‘i Islam, also rose to fame in Delhi and later Lucknow as a composer of Persian verse and a commentator in prose. This paper focuses on a commonplace book traded between Mushafi and Qatil, a work that culminated in the tazkirah known as ‘Iqd-i Surayya (The Necklace of the Pleiades). The tazkirah is a type of biographical compendium compiled from diaries and commonplace books, now gaining renewed importance among contemporary historians of the early modern Islamicate world. In this case, ‘Iqd-i Surayya chronicles Persian-language writers patronized in the years before Mushafi and Qatil’s time (roughly 1720-1770), and while Mushafi is credited as its author, Qatil collected its verse, biographies, and anecdotes. It is a work reflecting shared tastes and contrasting understandings of literary history, begging the question why did Qatil give Mushafi his commonplace book to be edited into a tazkirah? Reading this text in dialogue with both writers’ later output and other period compendia reveals that crafting literary history in the 1780s was an enterprise co-determined by the hierarchical demands of local literary sociability and competitive notions of inter-regional distinction. The tazkirah ‘Iqd-i Surayya unsettles our understanding of period socio-linguistic hierarchies, revealing that shared texts and the practices that created them chart contradictory histories of the Persianate world’s public sphere.