The tazkirah—a literary genre variously understood as anthologies, biographies, compendia, or literary histories—consists of short anecdotes about poets’ lives as well as selections of their work. Despite the difficulty of simply translating this genre into one consonant with Western forms, scholars have most often understood these texts as early forays into literary history, therefore mining them for historical information about prominent poets’ lives and works. Given this slippage between tazkirah and literary history, I will focus in this paper on the self-conscious translation of Urdu tazkirah into tarikh, or history proper. By examining the ways in which the tazkirah genre comes into Urdu from Persian just before the inception of the British Raj in 1857, I will show how the translation of tazkirah into tarikh by both native and Orientalist scholars relies on colonialist understandings of the importance of both history and vernacularization for the consolidation of proper “civilization”; indeed, my work shows that Urdu tazkirah’s resistance to translation into tarikh comes to justify Urdu’s status as a non-national and “backward” language vis-à-vis “proper” languages like Persian, Hindi, and, of course, English. Ultimately, my paper will demonstrate how the movement between tazkirah and tarikh has contributed to the canonization of Urdu as an imported creole in the Indian national imaginary.