This article shares key points of a public lecture conducted by Khajistan Founder Saad Khan via zoom on June 18, 2024 for the Type West's postgraduate program by The Letterform Archive and the San Francisco Public Library. For more about Khajistan watch Dust to Digital: Digitizing Historical Print Media from Pakistan and Iran with Saad Khan below and read Khajistan Manifesto.

"What happens when there is no true record of our environment?" Saad Khan asks poignantly.

Imagine history as a vast, complex jigsaw puzzle. Traditionally, only certain pieces—those selected by powerful institutions and dominant cultures—have been placed on the table. Many crucial pieces have been deliberately pushed aside, lost, or hidden. Khajistan is on a mission to collect these missing pieces, retrieve the fragments that have been overlooked, and reconstruct a more complete picture of historical understanding.

Most of us are taught from an early age that history is just a set of facts. The reality, however, is much more nuanced. Western viewpoints have dominated our understanding of the histories of South Asia, the Middle East, and some portions of Africa for many years. History seems to have been written with a single set of eyes, a single point of view, and a single voice.

Here comes Khajistan, a ground-breaking archival enterprise. Imagine it as a time machine gathering obscure tales, prohibited texts, and untold stories that have been relegated to the periphery of historical knowledge.

The Focus of Khajistan

Khajistan focuses on archiving neglected materials from the regions of the Maghreb, Arabia, Persia, Khorasan, and the Indus, spanning the past 130 years. It is not merely about collecting old, dusty documents but about preserving entire cultural ecosystems.

The Issue with Conventional Archives

Technological tools like the printing press, photography, and modern digital technologies have never been neutral. When these technologies traveled to places like Persia and the Indian Subcontinent, they brought subtle biases with them. For instance, photography often failed to capture darker skin tones, effectively "whitewashing" entire populations and their experiences.

Language became another tool of erasure. The nationalization of Urdu in Pakistan led to the suppression of regional languages such as Punjabi, Pashto, and Balochi. Every tongue that has been silenced represents a world of untold tales.

What Is Unique About Khajistan?

Khajistan is about more than preserving artifacts—it is about saving cultural identities. Consider typography as an example. Publications from the Islamic world in the 1960s and 1970s featured beautiful hand-drawn fonts that blended art, identity, and storytelling. Today, those fonts have largely been replaced by bland, conventional designs.

Khajistan’s collection is unparalleled in its scope:

• 10,000+ items from Pakistan and Afghanistan, including books, periodicals, images, advertisements, newspapers, and rare ephemera, many of them undigitized.

• 17,000+ digitized issues of Iranian periodicals spanning the last 70 years.

• A Judaica collection documenting Jewish communities in Iran, Morocco, Egypt, and Iraq, including an early 20th-century will of a Persian Jewish man, synagogue receipts from 1930s Tehran, and over 100 travel documents.

• 6,600+ Lollywood posters and 2,500 vinyl records capturing the golden era of Pakistani cinema.

• Rare feminist, lifestyle, and political magazines from Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Pakistan, including 3,000 Persian periodicals and 1,000+ leftist Urdu periodicals.

• 800+ street posters and leaflets collected in Pakistan in 2023, now digitized for public access at Princeton University.

• 500+ propaganda materials from Soviet, American, and Iraqi sources, including 300+ U.S. military leaflets.

This living archive challenges dominant narratives of the past and the present, creating a space for alternative perspectives.

The Significance of Archiving

Archiving is about more than just preserving old documents—it is about power. Who decides what is remembered? Whose stories are told, and whose are erased?

Khajistan challenges these norms by establishing a decentralized, inclusive archive that transcends borders and epochs. Its work also brings into focus overlooked cultures and subcultures. The archive includes:

• 212 Turkish erotic film posters.

• 282 banned Urdu erotic digests.

• 33 film cans of B-grade Urdu, Pashto, and Punjabi films.

These materials provide a lens into both historical taboos and cultural transformations.

A Glimpse into the Collections

Imagine examining a propaganda leaflet dropped during the war in Afghanistan or reading a journal written by a Persian Jewish man in 1936. These are not just documents; they are windows into entire worlds pushed aside by imperial histories.

Khajistan's collections include:

• 1,038 issues of Dokhtaran Pesaran (Iran).

• 370 Arabic feminist magazines from the mid-20th century.

• 7,000+ newspaper cuttings documenting Pakistani history from the 1940s to 2020.

• 6,000+ film-related items, such as lobby cards and postcards.

• 1,000+ Urdu children’s magazines dating back to the 1960s.

• Over 4000 Urdu, Pashto, Punjabi, Balochi, Persian and Arabic books on topics such as militancy, local conspiracy theories, magic, sex education etc.

This vast archive offers a comprehensive view of the cultural and political histories of the region.

Rewriting History

In a world where historical narratives have long been dominated by powerful governments and institutions, Khajistan represents something revolutionary. Its message is simple: Every story counts. Every voice deserves to be heard.

By conserving artifacts from underrepresented groups, lost languages, and overlooked cultural events, Khajistan is doing more than archiving. It is restoring dignity to forgotten and silenced narratives.