Urdu's emergence as the national language of Pakistan was neither obvious nor natural. That it became so marks the triumph of a particular understanding of the nation as a territory, a people, and a language in the singular. The choice of one language as the national language for this large territory squared neither with the broader administrative history of language under the British, nor with that of the Mughal or Sikh empires, nor with the longer histories of cosmopolitan and vernacular language use in the subcontinent. The year of independence, 1947, thus marked the beginning not only of a new political formation – a homeland founded on the basis of religion – but also of a new belief about the linguistic medium of a unitary culture in a large bounded territorial homeland.