A vibrant public sphere has come to be recognised as a necessary condition of modern democracies. Jürgen Habermas’s work has been a convenient point of departure for studies concerned with the concept of the public sphere and modernity, despite evidence mounting from feminist, postcolonial and subaltern studies that its despatialised nature and universalistic assumptions render invisible large groups that remained – temporally and spatially – outside the ‘mainstream’. Using examples from colonial and early modern India, this article demonstrates how these limitations play out in complex societies and why ‘space’ is pivotal in studying the public sphere, especially in caste societies. Following the spatial (re)turn within academia in the last decades, I argue that Henri Lefebvre’s work on social spaces provides a theoretical alternative that treats space with analytical rigour, allowing us to problematise the concept of the public sphere and to move away from Western Europe as an ‘ideal type’. The article demonstrates how an approach that is informed by Lefebvre’s framework is particularly useful in societies where caste influences spatiality and, consequently, lived experience – as well as having broader resonance and application.