Lens L3 — History & National Narrative

Axes scored: A3 (inquiry vs received truth) and A4 (national narrative closure), per the rubric. Unit of scoring is the BOOK. Board figures are aggregates of book scores. Quotation rule observed: every verbatim quotation below is from an English-medium source and has been re-grepped against its extracted file before inclusion. Urdu OCR (*-ur) supports structure, topic coverage and proper nouns only and is never quoted.

Citation convention: board/class-N/file · PAGE n, where n is the ===== PAGE n ===== marker (PDF page index). Two files are native digital text without page markers — history-8-en and pakistan-studies-10-en — and are cited by printed folio (f.n), derived from the page-footer numerals in the text stream.

Builds on: track pakistan studies (classes 9–10), track social studies (classes 6–8) and raw-religion-social-studies (per-book chapter inventories, vintage stamps, honorific-density counts). Structural claims taken from raw-profiles-social-studies were re-verified; where the raw notes and the track report disagree (KP History 8’s endpoint) the disagreement is resolved in §7.

1. Vintage control (mandatory frame)

Three curriculum generations are in simultaneous use. Punjab is the only board running one generation across all five history-bearing books. Sindh and KP each run mismatched vintages inside their own 6→10 sequence, in opposite directions: Sindh’s junior books are the modern ones, KP’s senior middle book is.

2. Scored table

A3: 1 = contested questions presented as contested, evidence weighed · 3 = inquiry verbs present but conclusions pre-loaded · 5 = conclusions handed down to be defended or memorised. A4: 1 = multiple actors, internal causes admitted, wrongdoing acknowledged · 3 = standard nationalist arc with some internal criticism · 5 = externalised blame, no internal fault, providential inevitability.

Board means

A4 is marked n/a for Punjab History 6, Sindh Social Studies 6 and Sindh Social Studies 7 because those books deliver no national narrative at all. That absence is itself a finding (§5) and is excluded from the mean rather than scored as openness.

Confidence composition. Punjab: 5/5 books high (2 native digital). Sindh: 4/4 high (English OCR). KP: 2/5 high, 3/5 low (Urdu OCR — KP’s three History books). KP’s A3/A4 means are the least secure in the table and rest structurally on its two English Pakistan Studies volumes.

2.4 Balochistan (BTBB) — inquiry verbs everywhere, conclusions supplied

Vintage: classes 6–9 are National Curriculum 2022-23 pilot editions (matched to Punjab’s SNC 2022); class 10 is National Curriculum 2006 (matched to KP and Sindh). The “NCC Inclusive Scheme 2024” recorded in the catalogue appears in none of the books — see lens religion §2.4.

A3 is inquiry versus received truth (1 = contested questions presented as contested, 5 = conclusions handed down). A4 is national-narrative closure (1 = internal causes admitted, 5 = externalised blame).

Balochistan produces the corpus’s sharpest divergence between the appearance of inquiry and its substance. Its books carry more evaluation verbs than any other board’s — History 8 alone has 32, Pakistan Studies 9 has 30 — and almost no open-opinion prompts: History 8 has zero, Pakistan Studies 10 has zero. The verbs are attached to conclusions the pupil is required to reach.

Balochistan means, English-medium: A3 = 2.91 (n = 11), A4 = 3.00 (n = 4).

The A3 mean understates what is happening, because it averages neutral science and geography evaluation against loaded history evaluation. Split by subject the pattern is unambiguous: geography and the English readers set genuinely open tasks; history and Pakistan Studies set justify-that tasks on contested propositions. The instrument is the same; only the contestability of the proposition changes.

The A4 finding is the more surprising one, and it cuts against expectation. History 8 is the most self-critical book found in the Balochistan corpus and one of the more self-critical in the whole study: it blames Muslim actors for Muslim decline, calls the Hijrat movement’s followers simple-minded, and rejects collective blame for 1857. Pakistan Studies 9, one year later, closes the narrative again. The board does not have a single narrative posture — it has two, and they sit in consecutive years.

2.5 Class 10 completion — where inquiry goes at matriculation

The finding: openness at matriculation is real, and it is topic-segregated

This study previously reported that the habit of treating a question as open collapses at matriculation. The completed class-10 tier requires that to be refined rather than repeated, and the refinement is more interesting than the original claim.

Open-opinion demand does not disappear at class 10. Punjab’s English 10 sets 22 open prompts, more than any other book in the corpus; Sindh’s sets 5; KP’s sets 3. What the prompts have in common is their subject matter: climate change, social media, space travel, winning a lottery, the central idea of a passage. Every one of them is personal, scientific or literary.

Set against that, the two class-10 books that carry the national narrative — KP’s Pakistan Studies 10 in both media — contain no open prompt and no evaluation verb at all. The pupil is asked what they think about social media and never what they think about martial law.

So the corrected statement is: openness at matriculation is not absent, it is allocated. Pupils are taught to hold and defend an opinion, and are taught it on subjects where no institutional interest is at stake. That is a sharper claim than a general collapse, and it is falsifiable — a single open-opinion prompt on a contested national question in a class-10 Pakistan Studies volume would refute it.

KP Pakistan Studies 10: availability high, demand zero

The KP volume deserves its own note because it is the strongest single instance of a pattern the project has predicted elsewhere. The book contains the critical political history: the 1970 election result, the failure to form a government, the imposition of martial law, nationalisation, Islamisation, the Afghan Jihad, and a 1973 Constitution described as federal and parliamentary. A pupil who reads it encounters a franker account of Pakistan’s political history than most books in this corpus offer.

And not one question in it asks the pupil to judge any of that. The demand attached to the whole volume is recall of dates. Content analysis alone would score this book as relatively open; assessment analysis scores it as closed. The two instruments disagree about the same book, and that disagreement is the reason this project measures demand as well as content.

2.6 Corpus expansion — the federal split, and the most open English readers found

Added 23 Aug 2026, with the Federal Board entering the study.

The federal board reproduces the corpus’s central pattern exactly

FBISE was added as the baseline against which provincial divergence could be measured. On assessment demand it turns out not to be a neutral baseline — it runs the same allocation the provinces do, and runs it harder.

Its English readers set the most open-opinion work in the entire corpus: 14 prompts at class 9 and 16 at class 10, more than any provincial reader at any class. Its Pakistan Studies 9 sets none at all — not one evaluation verb, not one request for the pupil’s view, in a volume whose subject is the ideological basis of the state.

That is the same division this study found in Punjab, Sindh and Balochistan, and it is the third independent confirmation: pupils are taught to hold and defend an opinion, and they are taught it on subjects where no institutional interest is at stake. Finding it at the federal board — the common ancestor rather than a provincial variant — moves the pattern from something four boards happen to share to something the federal curriculum itself distributes.

One partial exception, and it is worth stating. FBISE’s Pakistan Studies 10 sets 24 evaluation prompts and 4 open ones. It is the only class-10 book carrying the national narrative anywhere in this corpus to set open-opinion work at all. Whatever else is true of the federal board, its terminal Pakistan Studies volume asks more of the pupil than any provincial equivalent.

Punjab’s class-10 Pakistan Studies is the opposite pole: one evaluation verb and zero open prompts across 40,835 words. Set beside FBISE’s 24 and 4 on the same subject at the same class, this is the clearest evidence in the study that the demand attached to the national narrative is a provincial choice, not a federal instruction.

3. Per-board assessment: what narrative, how closed

3.1 Punjab (PCTB) — the most closed narrative in the corpus, and the newest books

The Punjab arc is: ancient world civilisations → the rise of Islam → medieval Europe → Muslim South Asia → Muslim decline → British conquest by conspiracy → Sir Syed as “Father of the Pakistan Movement” → Hindu bad faith → the Two-Nation Theory → Pakistan → external enemies → the army. There is no point in the five books at which a Pakistani actor is held responsible for a Pakistani failure.

Three features fix the A4 score:

1. The Two-Nation Theory is eternalised. Punjab alone dates it to the arrival of Muslims — “The concept of two-nation theory had begun with the arrival of Muslims in the subcontinent” (PS9 · PAGE 7), with 712 AD and Muhammad bin Qasim as the story’s start. Sindh and KP both date it to Sir Syed and 1867. This is not a small wording difference: it converts a nineteenth-century political argument into a thousand-year metaphysical fact, and removes the possibility that it was ever contested.
2. 1971 is told twice and externalised both times. History 8 (f.89) gives it six sentences with India as sole agent. Pakistan Studies 9 (pp.55–57) gives it nine causes, of which two are Hindu conspiracy, one is Indian interference, and none names a Pakistani decision-maker. The army “had to intervene”; the defeat is “India succeeded in its nefarious designs”; the surrender at Dhaka is never mentioned in any Punjab book.
3. Post-1971 domestic politics is either skipped or de-agentified. History 8 goes 1971 → Afghan War → six army operations, with no Bhutto, Zia, Benazir, Nawaz or Musharraf at all. Pakistan Studies 10 does narrate them, and does use the word “overthrew” for 1999 — but delivers Zia as a catalogue of “reforms”, the Afghan policy as international acclaim, and martial-law elections as “postponed due to various reasons”.

Counterweight, and it is real. Punjab’s is the only board whose books make a deliberate minority gesture: a Christian co-author (Prof. Anjum James Paul) on both History 8 and Pakistan Studies 10, a Sikh reviewer (Parshant Singh) on Pakistan Studies 10, the 11 August 1947 speech quoted including the passage usually cut, and named Christian, Parsi and scheduled-caste supporters of Pakistan in History 8. The same books are reviewed by the Nazaria-e-Pakistan Trust and keep the fully external-blame 1971. Modernisation and orthodoxy sit side by side in one volume.

On A3, Punjab is bimodal by grade. Its class 6–8 History books carry the corpus’s highest density of Bloom-style inquiry verbs (History 6: 21 hits per 20.8k words — the corpus maximum) and History 6 even teaches primary and secondary sources as a formal lesson (PAGE 5). But the verbs attach to stipulated conclusions: justify that the Indus Valley people were easily defeated; analyze why Akbar is considered the greatest; evaluate the causes of Muslim decline as identified by Shah Waliullah; debate to conclude the reason behind the Two-Nation Theory. The apparatus of inquiry is present; the object of inquiry is not. At classes 9–10 even the apparatus goes: 5 inquiry-verb hits and zero source-criticism words across 76,000 words of Pakistan Studies.

The single sharpest A3 datum in the corpus is internal to Punjab History 6. Page 30 tells pupils “We do not know why this civilization came to an end, but a number of possibilities have been suggested”, lists three, and asks them to “Analyze reasons for the demise” — then, in the same activity box, asks them to “Justify that Indus Valley people… were easily defeated by Aryans.” Page 61 then says the Aryan arrival “was a large migration and used to be seen as an invasion”, while page 60’s heading reads “Aryan Invasion of India” and its text reads “They were a white race.” The book contradicts itself three times on one question inside thirty pages.

3.2 Sindh (STBB) — the widest internal spread in the corpus

Sindh cannot be characterised as a board. Its A3 range is 1 to 5, and both extremes are in books a single child uses in consecutive years.

• Classes 6–7 (Sindh Curriculum 2014/15) are the most epistemically open history teaching in the corpus, and by a wide margin. The class-6 book teaches how historians work, that “history is always incomplete”, that histories “always involve interpretation”, and asks the teacher to pose the question what if one version were declared the only officially accepted story (PAGE 11). It presents creation and evolution as two theories side by side without adjudicating (PAGE 16). It teaches the Aryan-invasion thesis and then dismantles it on evidential grounds (PAGE 52). The class-7 book runs an archaeological-inference exercise whose explicit lesson is that single artefacts underdetermine conclusions (pp.179–180). Nothing in Punjab or KP resembles this.
• Class 8 (old federal reprint) flips to A3 5 / A4 5 in one year: eight pages of ideology, “Hindu racists”, “no clean heart for the Muslims”, two inquiry verbs in the whole book.
• Classes 9–10 (NC 2004) are recall-driven (A3 4) but carry the corpus’s least closed 1971. Sindh is the only board in the corpus that prints the word surrendered, that quantifies the language-movement dead (“a number of Bengali students lost their lives”), that states a counterfactual against its own state (“Had this demand been accepted earlier, East Pakistan would not have separated”), and that names the military regime as the actor that chose suppression over politics.

The cost of Sindh’s openness is coverage. The board that teaches historiography teaches almost no history. Its class-6 and class-7 books contain zero occurrences of Mughal, Muhammad bin Qasim, Delhi Sultanate, Pakistan Movement, Two-Nation or Sir Syed; “British” appears once in 232 pages of class 6, as a unifier of South Asia. Its entire pre-modern Muslim narrative is nil, its colonial narrative is eight pages at class 8, and its Pakistan Studies stops at 1974. A Sindh matriculant leaves school with no textbook knowledge of Bhutto’s government, Zia, Islamisation, the Hudood Ordinances, the 1998 nuclear tests, Musharraf, or terrorism — a fifty-year hole — while being better equipped than any other pupil in the corpus to interrogate a source.

3.3 KP (KPTBB) — the most complete chronology and the least closed senior books

KP delivers an unbroken chronological chain — 2500 BC–1526 (class 6), 1526–1857 (class 7), 1857–2022 (class 8) — then covers it again at 9–10. It is the only board with no chronological gap in its 6→8 sequence.

Its A4 mean (3.25) is the lowest in the corpus, and this rests on English-medium evidence in both senior books:

• PS9 attributes the loss of East Pakistan to “a never ending military dictatorship”, to the Awami League being “deprived of the power by one pretext or another”, to civilians killed in the military action, and — uniquely — records that the last governor’s advice to seek a political settlement “were not taken into account”.
• PS10 states that Zia banned expression and political activity, that his rule’s “over-extension” denied institutions the chance to grow, that 1999 was “the overthrow of the elected civilian government”, and that Kargil’s end “roused negative sentiment in the nation”.

KP is nonetheless a 3, not a 2. It keeps the Hindu-teachers cause verbatim in the same list as its self-criticism; it adds a conspiracy cause the other boards do not have (America secretly backing separation); it endorses Islamisation as “a milestone”; and it does not name the surrender either.

KP’s distinctive investment is the Afghan Jihad and its costs to KP itself — the only place in the corpus where a board’s history book accounts for a national policy’s provincial burden. Set against that is the absence of Pashtun anti-colonial resistance from KP’s own class-8 History: no Bacha Khan, no Khudai Khidmatgars, no Qissa Khwani Bazaar. The book’s only frontier-resistance narrative is Syed Ahmad Barelvi’s jihad, framed against Sikh rather than British rule. (Urdu-OCR absence — see §7.)

4. Vintage-controlled cross-board comparison

The headline of track social studies was that vintage, not province, is the fault line. That holds for A3 and fails for A4. They must be separated.

4.1 A3 tracks grade band and vintage, not board

Inquiry-verb density (occurrences of evaluate / analyse / compare and contrast / debate / critically / do you agree / in your opinion / argue / justify / interpret / assess, per 10,000 words):

A3 means by grade band: classes 6–8 → Punjab 3.0, Sindh 2.7, KP 3.3; classes 9–10 → Punjab 5.0, Sindh 4.0, KP 4.5. Every board’s inquiry apparatus collapses at matriculation, and it collapses regardless of vintage: Punjab’s PS9 is a 2023 book with the same near-zero inquiry density as KP’s 2006-curriculum PS9. The two boards disagree about almost everything else and agree exactly here.

Within classes 6–8, vintage explains the remaining spread. The two Sindh books written under the 2014/15 provincial curriculum score 1 and 2; the early-2000s federal reprint used one year later in the same province scores 5. This is a three-point A3 swing inside one board, driven purely by edition age. Any statement of the form “Sindh’s textbooks teach/don’t teach inquiry” is false at grade level.

The counter-case is Punjab. Punjab’s books are the newest in the corpus and its class 6–8 A3 mean (3.0) is worse than Sindh’s older-averaged 2.7 for the same grades. New vintage buys the vocabulary of inquiry; it does not buy the substance. Punjab History 6 has the highest inquiry-verb density in the corpus and still instructs pupils to justify a conclusion its own text has already hedged twice.

4.2 A4 tracks board, and survives vintage matching

Three clean vintage-matched pairs:

Restricting to the modern generation only (2015+ editions): Punjab A4 mean 4.5 (H7 4, H8 5, PS9 5, PS10 4) vs KP A4 mean 3.0 (H8 3, PS9 3) — a 1.5-point gap at matched vintage. Restricting to the old generation: Sindh 3, KP 3.5 — no gap.

Conclusion: Punjab’s higher narrative closure is not a vintage artefact. Punjab is running the newest books in the corpus and producing the most closed national narrative in it. The three boards’ older books converge on A4 ≈ 3; it is Punjab’s recent revision that diverges upward. On the evidence of the 1971 chapters, the divergence is editorial, not inherited: all three boards descend from one federal master text (the identical Iqbal Allahabad quotation appears in all three, and paragraph-level wording is shared between the 2004 Sindh book and the 2023 Punjab book — see track pakistan studies §3.3), and Sindh and KP revised their 1971 chapters toward internal culpability while Punjab revised its away from it.

4.3 Confounded findings — flagged

• Sindh SS8 (A4 5) vs Punjab History 8 (A4 5) is confounded: an early-2000s federal reprint against a 2022 SNC book. The equal scores cannot be used to argue Punjab is no worse than Sindh, nor the reverse.
• KP History 6 and 7 (A3 3, 4) vs Punjab History 6 and 7 (A3 3, 3) is doubly compromised: different vintage (NC 2006 vs SNC 2022) and different confidence (Urdu OCR vs English text). Report as indicative only.
• Sindh’s 1971 openness vs Punjab’s 1971 closure is not confounded in the direction that would explain it away: the open account is the older book (2004) and the closed account is the newer one (2023). Vintage works against the finding, which strengthens it.

4.4 What all three boards share, across every vintage

1. The “Hindu teachers poisoned Bengali minds” cause survives in all three 1971 chapters, under near-identical headings — “Role of Hindu Teachers” (Punjab PS9 · PAGE 56; Sindh PS10 · PAGE 45) and “NEGATIVE ROLE OF HINDU TEACHERS” (KP PS9 · PAGE 95). It sits in the Sindh and KP books next to their own indictments of Pakistani military rule. This is the clearest single marker of a shared master text surviving divergent revision.
2. No board names the Dhaka surrender except Sindh. Punjab has zero occurrences in a 1971 context across two books; KP PS9 has none, though KP PS10 gives the 93,000 POW figure.
3. Partition violence is absent from every book in the corpus, in either direction — no massacres, no trains, no abductions, no death toll.
4. No board teaches its own province’s history. No Sikh period or colonial Punjab in PCTB; no 1843 annexation, Talpurs or Hoshu Sheedi in STBB — which also teaches neither Muhammad bin Qasim nor the Indus Valley as its own subject at class 7; no Bacha Khan or Khudai Khidmatgars in KPTBB’s own class-8 History.
5. 1857 is “the War of Independence” everywhere it is taught — but with different owners: “all communities of India participated” (Punjab History 8, ch.1 summary) vs “the result of strong Muslim feeling of gaining back their lost power” (Sindh SS8 · PAGE 53).
6. No economic critique of colonialism in Punjab or Sindh — no drain of wealth, no famine, no deindustrialisation — and no railways-and-modernisation counter-narrative either. KP’s 2022 History 8 is the sole exception, carrying both sides (Urdu OCR, low confidence).

5. Vertical progression, class 6 → 10: what a pupil knows, and when

5.1 The three arcs

5.2 The shape

The Pakistan Movement is a class-8 subject in all three boards. No board front-loads it into classes 6 or 7; all three defer it to the last year of middle school and then repeat it at class 9. The differentiator is not when but how much and how far past 1947 it runs:

• Punjab defers it furthest and then delivers it heaviest. Its class-6 book ends in 661 CE and contains literally nothing of the modern national story (0 hits for Mughal, British, colonial, Quaid, 1947, Pakistan Movement, Two-Nation, Sir Syed). The whole colonial-and-Movement narrative arrives at once, as a 94-page dedicated volume at class 8, and is then re-run in full at class 9 from a 712 AD starting point.
• KP front-loads the Muslim-arrival narrative earliest — the arrival of the Muslims in India (711–1290) is chapter 3 of the class-6 book. A KP eleven-year-old meets Muhammad bin Qasim and the Delhi Sultanate; a Punjab eleven-year-old meets Mesopotamia and the Rashidun caliphs; a Sindh eleven-year-old meets Moen-jo-Daro and how a local council is funded.
• But Punjab’s English reader pre-empts its own History syllabus by a year. Punjab English 7 (PAGE 40) delivers the Two-Nation Theory, the 1940 Lahore address, the Nehru Report and the Fourteen Points in a Quaid-e-Azam reading lesson — while Punjab History 7 is still in medieval Europe and the Delhi Sultanate, and History 6 contains not one occurrence of Quaid, 1947 or Two-Nation. So the answer to “when does a Punjabi pupil first meet the Pakistan Movement?” is class 7, in English, not class 8, in History. Any progression analysis reading only the History books gets this wrong by a year and by a subject.
• Sindh defers it almost out of existence. Its 6→8 sequence contains no Muslim-rule narrative at all, and the entire colonial-to-1947 story is eight pages in a reprinted federal text. Sindh delivers less history, later, than any other board — and then stops in 1974.

Where each board’s coverage ends is where its politics show.

5.3 The gaps a transferring pupil falls into

The three sequences are mutually incompatible, and the incompatibility is not marginal:

• A pupil moving Sindh → Punjab after class 7 has never encountered Muslim rule in South Asia, and arrives in a class-8 book that opens with the British arriving to displace it.
• A pupil moving Punjab → KP after class 6 has never encountered the Delhi Sultanate (KP taught it in class 6); moving KP → Punjab after class 6, they meet medieval Europe instead.
• A pupil moving into Punjab or KP after class 7 has had all their citizenship education — the 1973 Constitution, fundamental rights, UDHR, the CRC, civil society, advocacy — and will never see it again, because Punjab’s SNC split allocated the Social Studies hour to History and Geography and left citizenship unplaced.
• A pupil moving out of Punjab after class 8 has done the corpus’s only full World Wars chapter; a KP pupil has a comparable one; a Sindh pupil has a UN chapter and no world-war narrative.

5.3b Grade placement of the reform movements — a hidden divergence

Grade-level comparison misfires without this (raw-religion-social-studies). Punjab places Shah Waliullah and the Faraizi movement at class 7 and keeps its class-8 reform chapter purely modernist-institutional — Sir Syed, Aligarh, Deoband, Nadwa — omitting Shah Waliullah, Syed Ahmad Barelvi and the Faraizi movement entirely at class 8. KP retains all of it, including the jihadi tehreek, at both class 7 and class 8. So at the same grade, KP’s reform chapter is materially more religious than Punjab’s — while Punjab’s class-9 Pakistan Studies then re-runs the Sir Syed line for a second time. The effect on A4 is that Punjab’s national narrative is delivered through a narrower, more modernist and more political cast of reformers than KP’s, which is part of why Punjab’s arc reads as more tightly closed: fewer competing Muslim traditions are in the story at all.

5.4 Repetition is the delivery mechanism

Every board teaches the Pakistan Movement at least twice — once at class 8 (History / Social Studies) and again at class 9 (Pakistan Studies). Counting the English readers raises it to three passes in Punjab and KP (Punjab: English 7, History 8, Pakistan Studies 9; KP: English 8, History 8, Pakistan Studies 9) and two in Sindh (Social Studies 8, Pakistan Studies), with Sindh’s English 9 adding a third in research rather than doctrinal form. Nothing else in the corpus is repeated at that rate — not the constitution, not the economy, not world history.

The pedagogical shape matters as much as the count. The narrative is not delivered once and built on; it is delivered, delivered again at greater length, reinforced in a second subject, and then examined. And at each pass the inquiry apparatus is thinner than the last: Punjab’s class-7 English lesson asks pupils to reconstruct how the author justifies the two-nations claim, its class-8 History asks them to “debate to conclude” it, and its class-9 Pakistan Studies simply asserts it as having begun in 712 AD. Across three passes the claim moves from argued, to stipulated, to eternal.

6. Cross-subject traces

This section reports how far a historical claim travels beyond the History / Social Studies / Pakistan Studies subjects. Coverage is uneven by design and by evidence quality: the English readers were swept directly for national-narrative keywords across all three boards and all five grades (§6.4b), and the Islamiyat / religious register rests on the counts banked in raw-religion-social-studies. The Urdu readers were not swept — Nastaliq OCR in this corpus cannot support presence/absence testing (§7 caveat 3), so any claim that a theme is or is not in an Urdu reader is out of reach here and is not made. Traces A, B, C and E below are established from the history-bearing books themselves; D and D2 are the genuine cross-subject findings.

6.1 Trace A — the Two-Nation Theory

Punjab’s internal contradiction is worth stating plainly: a Punjab pupil is taught in class 8 that Sir Syed originated the Two-Nation Theory and in class 9 that it “had begun with the arrival of Muslims in the subcontinent” — two incompatible origin stories, one year apart, neither flagged as contested.

6.2 Trace B — Sir Syed Ahmad Khan

Sir Syed is the single most consistently venerated modern figure in the corpus, and the only one who appears in every board’s history-bearing books at two different grades:

• Punjab: History 8 (dedicated reform-movement treatment; “Father of the Pakistan Movement”, f.20) + PS9 (pp.7, 18 — “In 1867, while exposing the enmity of Hindus against Muslims, Sir Syed…”).
• Sindh: SS8 · PAGE 53 + PS · PAGE 20 (Aligarh, the Urdu–Hindi controversy).
• KP: History 8 (Urdu, structural — سرسید present) + PS9 · PAGE 12.

No board presents his loyalism as contested. Punjab’s History 8 lists “loyalty to the British” as a heading under his services (f.18) and reports approvingly that he “wrote, ‘Loyal Muhammadans of India’ in which he explained the status of Muslims who had served Britishers with loyalty during the War of Independence” (f.19) — while the same book frames the British as conquerors-by-conspiracy and post-1857 oppressors. The tension is never remarked.

6.3 Trace C — 1857

Taught as “the War of Independence” in every board that teaches it. The term “Mutiny” appears zero times in Punjab History 8 (16 uses of “War of Independence”), Punjab PS9 (8), Sindh Pakistan Studies (2) and KP PS9 (2); its single occurrence in the corpus’s history-bearing English books is in Sindh Social Studies 8, where it is quoted only to be rejected — “The British called this war a Mutiny and dubbed their enemies as rebels. But this war was the first united effort of the Indians against the British” (SS8 · PAGE 53). The ownership question divides the boards: Punjab makes it an all-communities war — “The War of Independence was fought in 1857 CE in which all communities of India participated” (History 8 · ch.1 “Important Points”, f.13) — Sindh makes it a Muslim war for lost sovereignty (SS8 · PAGE 53), and KP’s class-7 book frames its aftermath as targeted persecution of Muslims and engineered communal division (Urdu, structural).

It is also the shared hinge of the whole national arc in every board: 1857 → Muslim disadvantage → Sir Syed → Aligarh → Two-Nation Theory → Muslim League → Pakistan. All three deliver the same five-step chain.

6.4 Trace D — the Prophet’s biography: history or religion?

The corpus’s clearest cross-subject duplication — and the one place where two readings of the same chapter initially conflicted. Both are correct, because they describe different properties.

Register: devotional, and extremely so. Punjab History 6 chapter 4, “Rise of Islamic Civilization” (pp.81–102), carries 180 occurrences of “Hazrat” in 24 pages — all 180 of the book’s total, none in the preceding 78 pages (raw-religion-social-studies). Its two Students’ Learning Outcomes are religious, not historical: “Explain the role of Hazrat Muhammad ﷺ in spreading Islam” and “Describe how Khulafah-e-Rashideen spread Islam after Hazrat Muhammad ﷺ” (pctbhistory-6-en · PAGE 81). The chapter opens on the Prophet’s birth, orphanhood and upbringing by Abu Talib (PAGE 82), and asserts revelation and Mi’raj as plain fact.

Form: periodised, dated, political history. The same chapter carries a CE Timeline (PAGE 93) running 571 → 610 → 622 → Badr → Uhud 625 → Khandaq 627 → Bani Qurayzah 627 → Hudaybiyyah → Khaybar, with causal glosses (“resulting in a turning point for Islam against the ruling Quraysh tribe”); it dates the Quraysh boycott of the Banu Hashim clan to 616–619 CE, names the “Year of Sorrow”, and states outright that “Islam was evolving from a religious movement to a powerful political one” (PAGE 88). That is history-writing, not hagiography.

The resolution, and the A3 finding it yields: the chapter is devotional in register and historical in form — and it is the one chapter in the book where the source criticism taught in chapter 1 is switched off. Punjab History 6 opens by teaching pupils to distinguish primary from secondary sources (PAGE 5) and closes with the only chapter carrying no critical source apparatus at all. The book does not lack the tools of inquiry; it withdraws them for one subject. This is a sharper A3 datum than the “Justify that… Aryans” prompt, because it is structural rather than a single exercise.

The contrast across boards is then structural, not merely tonal. KP’s History 6 places the arrival of Islam in political frame (ch.3, “Arrival of the Muslims in India, 711–1290”, followed by dynastic history) and quarantines devotion in a separate final chapter on Sufism (pp.88–104) — religion taught as religion, in its own chapter. Sindh’s class-6 book carries no seerah at all: the Prophet is mentioned once in 232 pages, to explain the Hijri calendar (social-studies-6-en · PAGE 221). And Punjab’s own devotional register then vanishes: History 7 uses “Hazrat” 6 times in 106 pages, History 8 zero times, with “Prophet” also zero. The devotional voice is confined to one chapter of one year and then abandoned.

6.4b Trace D2 — the national narrative arrives in the English reader first

The English readers are not neutral on this, and in Punjab they pre-empt the History syllabus by a full year.

• Punjab English 7 · PAGE 40 carries a complete Quaid-e-Azam lesson that delivers the Two-Nation Theory, the Lucknow Pact, the Nehru Report and the Fourteen Points, and quotes the 23 March 1940 Lahore address directly (“…they belong to two different civilizations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions”). Its while-reading marginal question asks pupils: “How does the author of the text justify that the Hindus and the Muslims belonged to two different nations?” (reassembled across OCR line breaks in the margin box; the surrounding body text is heavily watermark-damaged and is not quoted here). This is the same justify-a-given- conclusion move as History 6’s Aryan prompt, transplanted into a different subject — and it reaches the pupil in class 7, a year before History 8 teaches the Pakistan Movement at all.
• KP English 8 carries a Quaid biography lesson tracing him from belief in Hindu–Muslim unity to Muslim League leadership (english-8-en, 17 national-narrative keyword hits) — same grade as its History 8, so reinforcing rather than pre-empting.
• Sindh English 9 has the highest keyword count in the corpus (49) but the least doctrinal framing: it is a research-and-email unit in which pupils are set to “find some aspects of Jinnah’s life” and fill a table about Quaid-e-Azam and Iqbal — the national figures delivered as a research task, not a creed.
• Sindh English 6 and 7 carry zero hits — consistent with Sindh’s deferral of the national narrative everywhere else in those grades.

Counting keyword hits per board across the English readers: Punjab 42, KP 47, Sindh 54 — but the distribution matters more than the total. Punjab loads its at class 7 (30 of 42), KP spreads it 7→9, and Sindh concentrates all of it at class 9 in inquiry form.

6.5 Trace E — the army as the terminal actor of the national story

Reinforced across subjects and boards, and it is the one theme that grows rather than fades with grade:

• Punjab History 8 ends its final chapter — and therefore the entire 6→8 history sequence — not with a government or a constitution but with a list of six named military operations through Radd-ul-Fassad (2017), under the running head “Pakistan Army” (ff.90–91). Its 1965 narrative: “the Armed Forces of Pakistan, filled with the spirit of Jihad defeated the Indian Army” (f.87).
• Punjab PS9 makes the army the agent that “had to intervene” in 1971 (PAGE 55) and never the agent of anything that went wrong.
• KP is the counter-case in its own senior books, naming the army as the cause of institutional failure (PS10 · pp.16–17) and of Bengali estrangement (PS9 · PAGE 94) — the only board that does.

6.6 What is not reinforced

Civics is the mirror image of the national narrative. Sindh carries the 1973 Constitution, fundamental rights, UDHR (reproduced article by article), the CRC, civil society, advocacy method and the ombudsman across five chapters of Pakistan Studies and two units of Social Studies 6–7. Punjab and KP carry none of it as chapters at any grade. The boards that deliver the most closed national narrative deliver the least civic instrumentation with which to question it, and the board that delivers the most open historiography delivers the least history.

7. Caveats

1. KP’s History books are Urdu tesseract OCR and are theme-grade only. Three of KP’s five scored books (History 6, 7, 8) carry low confidence, and no KP History wording is quoted anywhere in this report. KP’s A3 mean (3.8) and A4 mean (3.25) therefore rest structurally on its two English Pakistan Studies volumes; treat the KP History scores as indicative. Cross-board KP comparisons should be stated against the Pakistan Studies books wherever possible.

2. KP History 8’s endpoint: the two prior reports disagree. track social studies §1.14 describes a 59-page book arcing to 1971; raw-profiles-social-studies corrects this, identifying the file as a two-up spread scan of ~115 printed pages running to 2022. The raw-profile correction is the right one. A numeral and proper-noun probe of history-8-ur returns 1971 (11×), 1973, 1977, 1988, 1999, 2008, 2018 and 2022, with بھٹو, ضیا, نواز and عمران all present — a book that stopped at 1971 could not produce that distribution. track social studies §1.14 should be amended.

3. Absence claims in Urdu files are the weakest claims here, and one of mine must be downgraded. I initially supported the Bacha Khan / Khudai Khidmatgars / Qissa Khwani absence in KP History 8 by noting that comparable single-token proper nouns do match in the same file (سرسید 4×, قرارداد 19×, سید 23×) while باچا, غفار, خدمتگار and خوانی return zero. raw-religion-social-studies shows that reasoning is not safe. In KP History 6 — a file that demonstrably contains a whole chapter of Sufi hagiography — “حضرت” returns 1 hit and “محمد” returns 0. Nastaliq ligatures break mid-token unpredictably, so a zero count is not evidence of absence even for high-frequency proper nouns. The Bacha Khan finding is therefore unresolved: it is consistent with a deliberate editorial omission (which is what raw-profiles-social-studies concluded from reading the chapter structure) but the token evidence I added cannot corroborate it and does not. It needs a human Urdu reader against the PDF. Per RUBRIC rule 4 it is reported as not established, not as absent. The same downgrade applies to every absence claim I make about a KP Urdu file.

4. Multi-word Urdu grep is unreliable in this corpus and should not be used for presence/absence testing; single tokens and Arabic-numeral dates are reliable, and were used instead.

5. A4 is not scored for three books (Punjab History 6, Sindh Social Studies 6 and 7) because they deliver no national narrative. Board A4 means are computed over the remaining books and are therefore not based on equal denominators: Punjab 4, Sindh 2, KP 4. Sindh’s A4 mean in particular rests on only two books and is the least stable figure in §2.

6. Punjab’s two class-8/class-10 files are native digital text and are cited by printed folio, derived from page-footer numerals in the text stream (footer numeral n precedes the content of folio n+1; the Two-Nation/“Father of the Pakistan Movement” and 1965 “spirit of Jihad” cites were checked against raw-profiles-social-studies to confirm the offset). All other cites are PDF page markers, which typically run 1–6 pages ahead of the printed folio; KP files additionally contain leading mirror-site advertisement pages.

7. Inquiry-verb density (§4.1) is a lexical proxy, not a measure of pedagogy. It is reported as ordinal and is deliberately paired with qualitative reading of the prompts, because Punjab History 6 tops the metric while containing the corpus’s clearest received-truth instruction. Do not cite the density table without §3.1.

8. Scores are of extracted text, not of physical books. No quotation was verified against a printed copy. Whether these exact editions are still in classrooms in 2025–26 cannot be determined from these files; the Sindh Pakistan Studies book in particular is a 2004-approved text whose maps were updated post-2019 while its political history was not, so partial revision without a new imprint statement is demonstrably possible in this corpus.

9. Sindh’s Pakistan Studies 9 and 10 files are the same book (a single combined 9–10 volume in two mediums, established in track pakistan studies §1.3). It is scored once. Board comparisons that count “books per board” should note Sindh has four scored units to Punjab’s and KP’s five.