Khajistan is the record of what was meant to be erased—from the Indus to the Maghreb.

Not preserved.
Dragged back.
For seers to see.
For meaning to be made.

We believe in metadata as ijtihad—
Each tag, each file name, each caption asks: what were we not allowed to remember?

Bootleg desire. Banned print material.
Leaflets that fell from the sky. Mujra posters. Madrassa books.
Digests sold in silence.
Photos. Tapes. Background scores.
State propaganda.
Zines no one kept. Footage no one wanted.
Songs that went unheard.
Pictures pulled from your uncle’s porn stash.

What slipped through.
What rotted.
What refused to die.

Khajistan saves it all—
not as heritage, but as evidence.
Of what was denied the right to shape the now.

We scan and publish with those who never saw themselves heard:
Hoarders. Collectors. Exiles.
The politically silenced. The religiously condemned. The gendered and erased.
Families who built false walls to hide what mattered.
People who knew—long before the rest of us—what memory would one day need.

They collected to stay sane under false man-gods and their false man-laws.
Or maybe they went mad—gathering hyper-specific fragments of a past they knew,
but could never speak aloud.
Fragments that gave meaning to their pressed existence
in a world ruled by one story.

What connects all the materials isn’t a theme.
It’s a crime.

Someone tried to disappear it.
Called it obscene, low, immoral, unworthy.

It survived.
So we archive it.

We don’t digitize for grants.
We don’t publish for prestige.
We don’t ask for credentials. We ask for evidence.

We preserve the residue—what lingers, leaks, and refuses to die.
We believe that "bootlegs" matter. That "trash" reveals.

That a mujra flyer or a madrassa workbook can tell you more than a museum label.
That a child’s spy story in Urdu might be more dangerous than any banned manifesto.

We’re not clean. We don’t want to be.
Our archive leaks. It moans. It misbehaves.

It remembers what the clerics condemned.
What the universities ignored.
What the state tried to burn.

We don’t follow archival standards.
We write over them.
Every scan is an act. Every caption a stand. Every image a refusal.

This isn’t heritage.
It’s damage control.

We publish in fragments—because that’s how the world arrives.
Smudged.

We collect what was left behind and hold it up to the light.

Khajistan is not a cultural startup.
Not a heritage project.
Not a safe space.

We’re not here to clean things up.
We’re here to make a mess.
To keep memory unstable.
To leave the wound open.

We’re pan-regional—but obsessed with the local.
We don’t flatten difference into aesthetic.
We listen for the accent. The slang. The smell.

As of 2025, we’ve archived over 21,000 issues of Arabic, Urdu, and Farsi publications—preserved as PDFs.
Published books, photo archives, and war leaflets.
Built digital shrines. Made space for ghosts. Not by grants. Not by permission.

As of 2025, here’s what we’ve done:

Satire that survived revolution:
Hundreds of Gol-Agha and Karikator issues—magazines from Iran that turned parody into resistance.

Glossies before the fall:
Full-color Sitare Cinema issues. Iran’s pre-revolution film world obsessions—stars, silhouettes, scandal. Glam before the blackout.

Feminism before and after the Shah:
Rare runs of Zan-e-Rooz, Dokhtaran Pesaran, Javanan-e-Amruz—women’s magazines.

Children’s stories, weaponized:
1,000+ Urdu kids’ journals from the 1970s onward. These weren’t bedtime tales—they were drills. Martyrs, model students, divine punishment, spy alerts, value judgements.

Desire on the fringe:
Hundreds of Urdu digests—Devta, Imran Digest, Jilawatan, Mujahid. Pulp fiction where sex, faith, and nationalism got tangled.

Lollywood’s DIY dream machine:
Posters, scrapbooks, lobby cards, and behind-the-scenes chaos from Pakistan’s film world. Hand-painted thighs. Smeared lipstick. Plastic guns. Fire. Scriptures,

Arabic feminist voices:
Bint al-Nil, Hawaa, Kull Shay’. Magazines from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon. 1920s–1970s.

Psyops from every empire:
Cold War Soviet mags in Arabic. U.S. military leaflets from Iraq and Afghanistan. Everyone lied. We kept the receipts.

Islamicate Judaica, unarchived until now:
Ketubahs, family photos, religious docs from Persian and Moroccan Jewish homes. Not curated for the West. Kept because they mattered—to someone.

Trash with a pulse:
Mujra posters. Erotic Urdu digests. Jailhouse cassettes. VHS pulled from hoarders and flea markets. 

And the fragments no one wanted:
CDs. Bodybuilding zines. Persian film posters, Turkish erotic posters. Over 800 ephemera items from the roads and streets of Pakistan. Handwritten flyers. Archives that smell like glue, sweat, sex, and effort.

Let this archive ruin everything they said about us.

We weren’t supposed to last.
But we did.
And so did those before us.

They left proof—
that people like us were here.
They did things. They made things. They played.

Khajistan is building that proof.
And building it is play.
Because play matters.
And life goes on—even when they made sure it shouldn’t.

Khajistan — let’s play.