Who Gets to Tell Our Story?
by Akasha Arshad
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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.
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 Saad Khan and Khajistan, his ground-breaking archive enterprise. Imagine it as a time machine that is gathering obscure tales, prohibited texts, and untold stories that have been relegated to the periphery of historical knowledge.
Khajistan focuses on archiving neglected materials from the regions of the Maghreb, Arabia, Persia, Khorasan, and the Indus, spanning the past 130 years.
The Issue with Conventional Archives
The printing press, photography, and modern digital technologies are examples of Western technological tools that have never been neutral. They brought undetectable prejudices with them when they traveled to places like Persia and the Indian Subcontinent. For example, darker skin tones were difficult for photographers to capture, therefore "whitewashing" entire populations and their experiences.
The language itself turned into a means of erasing. The nationalization of Urdu in Pakistan resulted in the suppression of regional languages such as Punjabi, Pashto, and Balochi. Every tongue that has been silenced is a world of untold tales.
What Is Unique About Khajistan?
Khajistan is not about gathering ancient, dusty documents. Whole cultural ecosystems are being saved. Consider typography as an example. Beautiful hand-drawn fonts that blended art, identity, and storytelling were used in Islamic world publications in the 1960s and 1970s. These days, boring, conventional designs have taken the place of those fonts.
The scope of Khajistan’s collection is unparalleled:
- 10,000+ items from Pakistan and Afghanistan, including books, periodicals, images, ads, newspapers and rare ephemera. Many of them undigitized.
- 17,000+ digitzed issues of Iranian periodicals spanning the last 70 years.
- A Judaica collection documenting Jewish communities in Iran, Morocco, Egypt, and Iraq. some examples are an early 20th century will of a Persian Jewish man, synagogue receipts from 1930s Tehran and over 100 travel documents of Jewish people from a round the region.
- Over 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 and sold to Princeton University who will digitize the materials for public access..
- 500+ propaganda materials from Soviet, American, and Iraqi sources, including 300+ U.S. military leaflets.
This isn’t just about preserving objects—it’s about creating a living archive that challenges the dominant narratives of the past and the present.
The Significance of This
Archiving is more than merely keeping old documents safe. It has to do with power. Who determines what should be remembered? Whose tales are remembered and whose are told?
By establishing a decentralized, inclusive archive that crosses countries and ages, Khajistan defies this. They are changing our understanding of history, not merely conserving materials.
Khajistan’s work also brings into focus overlooked cultures and subcultures. Their archive includes 212 Turkish erotic film posters, 282 banned Urdu erotic digests, and 33 film cans of B-grade Urdu, Pashto, and Punjabi films—materials that provide a lens into both historical taboos and cultural transformations.
An Overview of the Collection
Imagine glancing at a propaganda leaflet dropped during the war in Afghanistan or examining a journal written by a Persian Jewish man in 1936. These are windows into whole worlds that were on the verge of extinction, not just documents.
Khajistan’s collection contains:
- 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.
- Over 1,000 Urdu children’s magazines dating back to the 1960s.
This vast and varied archive provides a comprehensive view of the cultural and political histories of the region.
The More Comprehensive View
Khajistan stands for something revolutionary in a world where historical narratives have long been dominated by powerful governments and institutions. The message is: Every story counts. Every voice is worthy of being heard.
Khajistan is doing more than archiving by conserving artifacts from underrepresented groups, lost languages, and missed cultural events. They're bringing dignity back. They are providing the silenced with a voice.
"What happens when there is no true record of our environment?" wonders Saad Khan in a moving way. Through the fissures, our history is revealed.
No more. One forgotten tale at a time, those cracks are being filled in thanks to the aggressive archiving of Khajistan and other independent niche archives around the region.