Sandwiched somewhere between a government, which considered it to be the place of seditious propaganda, and an Indian colonial cultural elite, prone to thinking of it as an embarrassing site of the popular,1 was a heterogeneous public whose contribution to the nationalist movement is acknowledged each time we take note of the thousands who marched, protested, and packed the prisons of British India in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1947, in the editorial cartoons of some newspapers, this same group emerges as the public anxiously awaiting the outcome of closed- door negotiations between the colonial government and the leadership of the nationalist movement