Research question. A former pupil of Punjab schools reports that his education carried no Punjabi literary content at all — no Bulleh Shah, no Waris Shah, no folk canon — while demanding a high level of fluency in Urdu language and literature, and that the effect was a drift away from Punjabi. Do the textbooks support that? And is Punjab unusual among the boards, or is every province doing the same thing to its own language?
Short answer. The recollection is right about the mechanism and wrong about the uniqueness, and the correction makes it a stronger finding rather than a weaker one.
Punjab’s Punjabi poets are named — twenty-six times across the corpus, more than KP or Balochistan name theirs. But they are named in survey lists inside other subjects, never taught as literature. No Punjabi poet or folk figure appears in any of Punjab’s five Urdu literary readers, across roughly 195,000 words. The literary canon a Punjabi child is taught as literature is entirely Urdu.
And on the wider question: Punjab is not the exception. Sindh is. Three of the five boards publish nothing in the provincial language and teach no regional poet as a text. Sindh does both.
1. Medium of instruction — the hardest fact, and the shortest section
| Board | English | Urdu | Provincial language |
|---|---|---|---|
| Punjab PCTB | 22 | 23 | 0 Punjabi |
| Khyber Pakhtunkhwa KPTBB | 18 | 18 | 0 Pashto |
| Balochistan BTBB | 20 | 16 | 0 Balochi / Brahui |
| Federal FBISE | 10 | 5 | — (no provincial language applies) |
| Sindh STBB | 21 | 12 | 2 Sindhi |
Sindh is the only board in this corpus that publishes school textbooks in a provincial language. Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan publish in English and Urdu only.
This is a claim about what is in this corpus, not about what each province permits. It is a 75-book sample per board of the subjects that carry social content, not a complete catalogue, and a board could publish provincial-language editions this project did not acquire. What can be said is that across 165 current books assembled without regard to this question, provincial-language material appears twice, and both times it is Sindhi.
2. Are the regional poets named at all?
Named-figure probes are legitimate on Urdu and Sindhi material even at theme grade, because proper nouns survive degraded Nastaliq where wording does not.
| Board | Punjabi figures | Sindhi figures | Pashto figures | Balochi figures |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Punjab | 26 | 10 | 5 | 0 |
| Sindh | 8 | 46 | 0 | 0 |
| Khyber Pakhtunkhwa | 8 | 3 | 1 | 1 |
| Balochistan | 9 | 5 | 5 | 2 |
| Federal | 14 | 7 | 1 | 2 |
Figures counted: Bulleh Shah, Waris Shah, Shah Hussain, Sultan Bahu, Mian Muhammad Bakhsh, Khwaja Ghulam Farid, Heer, Ranjha, Sohni, Mahiwal (Punjabi); Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai, Sachal Sarmast, Sassui, Punhun, Marvi, Shah Jo Risalo (Sindhi); Khushal Khan Khattak, Rahman Baba, Ghani Khan, Hamza Baba (Pashto); Jam Durrak, Mast Tawakali, Hani, Shay Mureed (Balochi).
On the crude count the recollection is refuted. Punjab names Punjabi figures twenty-six times — the second-highest own-language count in the table, behind only Sindh. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa names its own Pashto canon once across 1.26 million words, and Balochistan names its Balochi canon twice. If any board erases its provincial literature by not mentioning it, it is KP, not Punjab.
The interesting question is therefore not whether the names appear. It is where.
3. Where Punjab’s Punjabi poets actually appear
Of Punjab’s twenty-six mentions, every one falls in just two books, and neither is a literature book.
| Book | Mentions | What kind of passage |
|---|---|---|
| English 7 | 9 | A survey chapter describing the four provinces |
| Pakistan Studies 10 | 17 | A list of shrines and saints; a passage on provincial languages |
English 7, in a section running through the provinces one by one, immediately before a paragraph beginning “Balochistan”:
“Sufi literature is very popular. Punjabi poetry is renowned for its deep meaning, beautiful and hopeful insight. Some famous poets of Punjab are Sultan Bahu, Mian Muhammad Bakhsh, Baba Farid, Shah Hussain, Anwar Masood, etc. Waris Shah, whose contribution to Punjabi lit[erature] … is known as the Shakespeare of Punjab. Bulleh Shah was a Punjabi Sufi poet, a humanist and a philosopher. Some popular folk tales of Punjab include Sassi-Punnu, Sohni Mahiwal, etc.”
Note the shape: a list, closed with etc., twice. Waris Shah is introduced by comparison to an English writer. Nothing is quoted. No poem is read.
Pakistan Studies 10 does the same in a passage on national and provincial languages:
“a lot of things are common in literature of all regions. Sufism, humanity, justice, love and cooperation are common subjects of national and provincial languages. Hazrat Sultan Bahu, Hazrat Baba Bulhe Shah, Hazrat Waris Shah, Hazrat Shah Hussain, Hazrat Mian Muhammad Bakhsh …”
and again in an enumeration of shrines, where the poets appear beside Data Ganj Bakhsh and Sakhi Sarwar as objects of veneration rather than authors of a body of work. The honorific Hazrat before each name is doing the categorisation: these are saints being listed, not poets being studied.
4. The Urdu readers — the finding that carries the thread
Punjab publishes an Urdu literary reader at every class from 6 to 10. Together they run to roughly 195,000 words and they are where a Punjabi child meets literature as literature: poems set for memorisation, prose set for comprehension, authors set for examination.
A name probe across all five returns no Punjabi poet and no Punjabi folk figure.
| Punjab Urdu reader | Words | Punjabi figures found |
|---|---|---|
| Urdu 6 | 34,907 | none |
| Urdu 7 | 40,131 | none |
| Urdu 8 | 31,331 | none |
| Urdu 9 | 37,944 | none |
| Urdu 10 | 50,730 | none |
A first pass appeared to find the folk heroine Heer 2–12 times per volume. Every hit proved to be the three-character string ہیر sitting inside an unrelated Urdu word — پرہیر, ہیرا, مشاہیر. They are OCR artefacts, not occurrences, and the corrected count is zero. This is recorded because an uncorrected version of this table would have supported the opposite conclusion.
So the structure is: named in geography and civics, absent from literature. Punjabi is something a Punjabi pupil is told about in English and in Pakistan Studies. It is not something they are taught to read.
5. What Sindh does differently
Sindh’s English 9 reader contains a full named unit:
UNIT 2 — ROLE MODEL · 2.1 Reading Comprehension: Shah Abdul Latif
Twenty-five mentions of Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai in that one volume, structured as a comprehension lesson with listening, speaking and language-practice sections built on it. The province’s own poet is the text, and the unit’s title assigns him a role: not heritage, but a model.
Sindh’s Pakistan Studies 10 adds the discursive frame:
“The Sindhi poetry of the mystic saints is equally popular not only in Sindh province but also in other parts of Pakistan. Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai and Sachal Sarmast are the most prominent poets of mysticism in Sindhi poetry. The people get solace in their poetry and are proud of the[m]”
That is the distinction the whole thread turns on. Both provinces name their poets. One of them sets a poet as a reading comprehension.
6. Tiered verdict
Using the four-tier scheme this project applies to its other thread analyses:
- Tier 1 — explicit erasure. Not established. No board states or implies that a provincial language is inferior, and none omits its own canon entirely.
- Tier 2 — differential treatment, established. Yes, and firmly. Sindh teaches a regional poet as a set text in a language reader; Punjab, KP and Balochistan do not. Sindh publishes in a provincial language; the others do not.
- Tier 3 — structural placement, established. Yes. Punjab’s Punjabi content sits entirely in description of provinces (English 7) and enumeration of heritage (Pakistan Studies 10), and entirely outside the five books that teach literature.
- Tier 4 — effect on pupils. Not established, and not establishable from this corpus. Nothing here shows what any Punjabi child concludes about their own language.
7. What would refute this
- A Punjabi poem, or a lesson built on a Punjabi text, in any Punjab Urdu reader at any class. The probe covered proper nouns only; a Punjabi poem printed without naming its author would not have been detected, and finding one would weaken §4 considerably.
- Punjabi-medium textbooks published by PCTB that this project failed to acquire. That would not disturb §3 or §4, but it would refute §1.
- Evidence that Sindh’s Shah Latif unit is an isolated case rather than a pattern — the Sindhi-medium volumes in this corpus are two, and both are class 6.
8. Why this is a thread and not a new lens
The obvious response to this material is to add an eighth axis — linguistic and cultural self-representation — and score every book on it. This project has decided not to, and the reason should be on the record.
The rubric’s authority comes from having been fixed before any book was read. That is stated on the method page and it is the answer to the most serious charge that can be made against a study like this one: that the instrument was shaped to fit the conclusion. Adding an axis now — after the corpus is assembled, after a pattern has been noticed, in response to a hypothesis — would forfeit that, and would forfeit it for all seven existing axes rather than just the new one.
The same reasoning already governs elsewhere in this project: historical editions are catalogued and never scored, because the rubric was not written for them.
A thread carries no such cost. It states a hypothesis, tests it against the corpus, reports the tier reached, and says what would refute it — without touching the instrument. If this question deserves an axis, the honest way to give it one is a second, separately pre-registered rubric, declared before the books are re-read, and reported apart from the first.