From Chapter One The language of the Muslim nation he was talking about was Urdu, which was incongruous, demographically speaking, as it was the primary language of only 3 percent of the population; the diverse people comprising Pakistan spoke dozens of languages, with Bangla--the mother tongue of 56 percent--representing the speech of the majority (Van Schendel 2020). Datta, responding to the Prime Minister, tried to clarify that removing Urdu's centrality to the nation of Pakistan "was not the intention," but Khan would no longer broach further discussion. Speaking as majority leader, he said that the assembly would not support Datta's amendment or "such a kind of amendment if ever it comes forward in the future" (Al-Helal 2016, 232-34). The motion did not advance. I find this exchange expressive of one consequence of the dual nature of language and how it overlaps with communicative norms and national identity in the subcontinent. Their disagreement foregrounds language as a consequential rhetorical common topic, or topoi, in shaping identity and political unity during a transitional moment from a colonial order to a postcolonial one. Datta's proposal to the assembly was, on its face, to recognize the plurilingual norms of subcontinental culture in its procedural practices, yet Khan's response centered its potential consequences for the idea of Pakistan. Khan did not think that the newly independent nation could effectively integrate its various cultures and languages without one national language and the idea such a linguistic regime afforded.

Urdu, he believed, would foster the unity of Pakistan as one nation. He did not believe Bangla was suitably Islamic; moreover, it was too closely associated with Bengalis. The tension between the speakers reflected wider social issues between different ethnic and speech communities, as well as distinct language ideologies, extant in the newly independent country. The disagreement illustrates the tension between the idea of languages as such and linguistic identities as connected to specific populations (i.e., Bangla being the language of Bengalis).