Ahmed Khan, Nawab Viqar-ul-Mulk and Maulvi Abdul Haq. Urdu is a Central Indo-Aryan language of the Indo-Iranian branch, closely related to Hindi and belonging to the Indo-European family of languages. It developed under Persian, Arabic and Turkic influence on apabhramshas (last linguistic stage of the medieval Indian Aryan language Pali–Prakrit) in South Asia during the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire. With its Perso-Arabic script, the language was considered a vital element of the Islamic culture for Indian Muslims; Hindi and the Devanagari script were seen as fundamentals of Hindu culture. While the use of Urdu grew common with Muslims in northern India, the Muslims of Bengal (a province in the eastern part of the British Indian sub-continent) primarily used the Bengali language. Bengali is an Eastern Indo-Aryan language that arose from the eastern Middle Indic languages around 1000 CE and developed considerably with a rich literature, history and cultural identity. Unlike many other Indic Languages, Bengali got patronage from the States and Empires in the Middle Ages. During the Bengal Renaissance, the modern Bengali literature developed it's stronghold. Bengalis irrespective of religious identity used Bengali language. Supporters of Bengali opposed Urdu even before the partition of India, when delegates from Bengal rejected the idea of making Urdu the lingua franca of Muslim India in the 1937 Lucknow session of the Muslim League. The Muslim League was a British Indian political party that became the driving force behind the creation of Pakistan as a Muslim state separate from British India. Early stages of the movement After the partition of India in 1947, Bengali-speaking people in East Bengal, the non-contiguous eastern part of the Dominion of Pakistan, made up 44 million of the newly formed Dominion of Pakistan's 69 million people. The Dominion of Pakistan's government, civil services, and military, however, were dominated by personnel from the western wing of the Dominion of Pakistan. In November 1947, a key resolution at a national education summit in Karachi advocated Urdu and English as the sole state languages. Opposition and protests arose immediately. Students from Dhaka rallied under the leadership of Abul Kashem, the secretary of Tamaddun Majlish, a Bengali Islamic cultural organisation. The meeting stipulated Bengali as an official language of the Dominion of Pakistan and as a medium of education in East Bengal. However, the Pakistan Public Service Commission removed Bengali from the list of approved subjects, as well as from currency