Teo Kok Seong of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia said the discoveries should not be ignored or “swept under the carpet” as they were made by a historian.

“He is not accusing anyone of anything but raising the discoveries he made,” he said.

Ranjit said in a recent statement that the textbooks in use in secondary schools were Malay-centric and Islam-centric, and had omitted key facts relevant to nation-building while including factual distortions and exaggerations.

He pointed out that most of the textbooks’ writers were Malay, and said this meant students were learning world and Malaysian history from the perspective of one particular race.

“The glaring defects in the current history textbooks only confirm the bias of the writers,” Ranjit said. “They do not provide an adequate, balanced and fair account of the emergence and growth of Malaysia’s plural society.”

Teo said it was understandable for Malaysian history books to focus on Malays and Muslims but they should not sideline others who helped build the country. “That is a problem we should look into as others are also studying the textbooks.”

He said Chinese, Indians and Bumiputeras in Sabah and Sarawak would feel that their presence was not well represented in the books, causing them to lose a sense of belonging to the country. “They may feel like they are not part of the country.”

Ranjit said each of the books he studied had less than 10 pages on Indian and Chinese civilisations and more than 20 pages on Islamic civilisation.