Pakistan is a country in South Asia. It sits west of India and east of Afghanistan and Iran, with sea to the south. The capital is Islamabad. Most people are Muslim, and the state calls itself an Islamic Republic — though actually, not everyone who lives there is Muslim, and people speak several languages. Urdu is a main official language; English is still used in government and in many schools. The country became independent in 1947, when the British left India and the land was split in a huge, painful process called Partition: a mainly Hindu state that kept the name India, and a mainly Muslim state called Pakistan. At first Pakistan had two wings, West Pakistan and East Pakistan, with India in between. In 1971 East Pakistan became a new country, Bangladesh. Older maps, and older relatives, may still talk as if that had not happened. Learner books often give a population from 2014 of about 193 million. That figure is a snapshot, not a forever fact; the real number is quite a bit higher now.