The “public turn” in the humanities constellates a moment of critique, identifying literature’s dis-embedded and elite orientations, mostly institutionalized by academics and the reigning world systems. The reified literary space and its ultimate syllabification have completely dematerialized literature, even de-radicalizing postcolonial studies, Black studies, and Dalit studies into dis-embedded academic practices. The questions I pose inquire whether the postcolonial literary enterprise mostly relies on elite “europhonic” expressions of the aesthetic, while ignoring a vast corpus of vernacular and local texts that narrate the struggles and visions of the actual publics and the counterpublics (Fraser 1992 and Warner 2005). The heterodox and subaltern dimensions of the publics—the counterpublics—also expose the conformist and majoritarian character of the publics. This project, therefore, argues for the restoration of the publics in literature while at the same time problematizing the ideological and hegemonic kernel of the category of the publics itself. As the idea of the counterpublics signifies a greater materiality of dissent within the category of the publics, this paper empirically examines the vernacular Sahajiya literature of Bengal (fifteenth to nineteenth centuries), which involves the voices of the Bengali counterpublics, including the subaltern Bauls and the Fakirs who embodied the Sufi-Sahajiya or Sufi-Vaisnab heterodox traditions of vernacular cosmopolitanism.