Khajistan in the Dazed MENA 100
by Khajistan Cultural Desk
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Dazed MENA named Saad Khan to the Dazed MENA 100 in its first issue, in a profile by Maya Abuali published on 4 December 2024 and filed under anti-colonialism. It was the first extended press account of the archive.
Abuali takes the name as the way in: Khajistan, a 9th-century village in Herat, carried forward as the name of an archive for media from the Indus to the Maghreb. She runs through what the archive takes in — banned books, propaganda leaflets, rare magazines, TikTok videos — and reads the manifesto’s two questions back as the argument of the whole project: who decides what is worth preserving, and who benefits from the erasure of the rest.
The examples she picks are the salacious ones. Challawa, the 1970s Urdu novel about a middle-aged woman’s brandy and her escapades with younger women, which she notes is unlikely ever to be reprinted in Pakistan. Toshakhana’s Ottoman erotica, Pakistani film ephemera and obscure Persian periodicals. The press titles get their own paragraph: Loose Cannons and Dangerous Curves, American War Propaganda Leaflets, The Real Colours of Filmic Fairies.
We believe that archiving all and every kind of knowledge is tantamount to staring at the future, which at times might seem far and distant, but is traveling towards us at a vertiginous rate.
— Saad Khan, quoted from the Khajistan manifesto
The digital figure she reports is over 80,000 community-contributed photos and videos, as of late 2024. Her closing move is the AI one: that the archive exists partly because the systems now being trained on the internet inherited a lopsided one, and that what is missing from the record will be missing from them. The films sit in the same paragraph as the archive — Chuppan Chupai (2013), Qandeel (2017), Showgirls of Pakistan (2020).
Read the full profile at Dazed MENA →
Text by Maya Abuali for Dazed MENA, 4 December 2024. Khajistan’s manifesto ran in full in Dazed MENA Issue 00, and is reproduced here. A later conversation between Saad Khan and Mona Chalabi ran in Dazed MENA Issue 02 and is here.
