This chapter tracks how anxieties about the quality of “traditional” Odia literature served as a site for imagining a cohesive Odia public who would become the consumers and beneficiaries of new, modernized Odia-language canon. A renewed public controversy about the Odia language was initiated in the 1890s with the publication of a serialized critique of the works of Upendra Bhanja, a very popular precolonial Odia poet. The critic argued that Bhanja’s writing was not true poetry, that it did not speak to the contemporary era, and that it featured embarrassingly detailed discussions of obscene material. These claims sparked responses and counterresponses in all the major newspapers in the Odia-speaking areas. I argue that the central theme in these discussions was a concern for linguistic community-building that presupposed a new kind of readership of literature in the Odia language. This turn-of-the-century literary debate played an important role in the ongoing consolidation of an Odia-centric public sphere. Such consolidation came at the cost of the suppression of competing nonelite counter publics that were either contemporary phenomena or had preexisted the emergent mainstream Odia public sphere. Through a reading of contentious discussions about literary realism and prevailing critiques of literature produced in counter public spaces such as travelling theatres and millenarian cults, I argue that the vernacularity of Odia was established through radical exclusion of the nonelite.