Saad Khan: The archivist behind Khajistan

History has always been curated to justify the interests of those in power. Saad Khan, a Lahore-born filmmaker and preservationist, has made it his mission to conserve the eclipsed and censored stories of the Islamicate world. Khajistan, his archive, is named after a 9th-century village in Herat, Afghanistan–symbolic of the archive’s role as a reclamation project, a habitat for media from the Indus to Maghreb that would otherwise be buried into obscurity. 

Founded in New York City, Khajistan acquires, digitises, and publishes a vast array of materials: banned books, propaganda leaflets, rare magazines, and even TikTok videos. It prods at traditional hierarchies of knowledge by centring the long-stifled narratives of marginalised communities, radically reframing how history is told and who gets to tell it. Beyond its archival efforts, Khajistan is also an antidote to dominant narratives of globalised culture–with Saad describing it as “a lens focused on a richer, more inclusive world.”

To understand Khajistan’s mission in all its glory, the website offers a long, interrogative manifesto, in which Saad poses all the right questions; notably, ‘Who decides what is worth preserving?” and “Who benefits from the erasure of the rest?” The website’s acquisitions betray the answers as the texts they collect subvert retrospective conventions surrounding ‘respectability’ and ‘propriety.’ Take, for instance, ‘Challawa,’ a 1970s Urdu novel about a middle-aged woman’s romantic escapades with brandy and young women—a text unlikely to ever see a reprint in Pakistan. 

These sorts of salacious and other controversial tales can be found housed in one of Khajistan’s flagship collections, Toshakhana, which also contains treasures like Ottoman erotica, Pakistani film ephemera, and obscure Persian periodicals. Its digital arm provides access to over 80,000 community-contributed photos and videos, ensuring these relics and materials are preserved and widely accessible. For Saad, this democratisation of information addresses a fundamental imbalance in how SWANA’s culture is represented online, especially as they manifest now in AI systems and global perceptions. Toshakhana thus offers a window into lives, cultures, and histories that risk vanishing in the face of indifference or active suppression. 

The documenting and preserving of overlooked histories presents a series of obstacles that Khajistan has faced for years. “It is exceedingly significant to understand the magnitude of power held by the custodians of knowledge and aesthetics of the Middle World,” Saad explains in the manifesto. “Not only do they comprise a powerful, elite class, but also the backing of the state’s bureaucratic machinery.”

The burden of these challenges are overshadowed by Saad’s unwavering belief in the archive’s importance, a conviction he makes clear in hauntingly prescient words: “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 writes. “Maybe, in some alternate timeline, those in the future might be staring at us too, and we don’t want them to look at an abyss. We don’t want them to wake up screaming.”

Khajistan also operates as a publishing house, releasing treasures like ‘Loose Cannons and Dangerous Curves,’ an acerbic and amusing anthology of Pakistani film reviews that casts light on the nation’s fervently loved yet criminally overlooked cinematic history. Khajistan’s publication ‘American War Propaganda Leaflets,’ is a chilling collection of US psyops in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya from the years 1990 to 2022. There’s also ‘The Real Colours of Filmic Fairies,’ an English translation of a book on the underbelly of Pakistani cinema—centred “solely and salaciously” on the origins of female actors in Pakistani cinema. With these publications, Khan looks after the raw beauty and humanism of vernacular culture. 

Before Khajistan, Saad established himself as a filmmaker, impermeable in his confrontation of societal taboos. His projects include ‘Chuppan Chupai’ (2013), a coming-of-age story set in Pakistan; ‘Qandeel’ (2017), a documentary about feminist icon Qandeel Baloch and the intersection of fame, gender, and violence; and ‘Showgirls of Pakistan’ (2020), which examines the lives of mujra dancers often excluded from mainstream discourse. Much like Khajistan, these films spotlight the lives of those rendered invisible by social and political forces, entombed by a barrage of indifference.

Saad’s ultimate goal is nothing short of radically envisioning how knowledge is preserved and shared. In actively dismantling the hegemony of elite narratives and state-sanctioned histories, Khajistan is creating a space for crucial parallel histories to emerge. “We [archive] for those who wait in time, those who might not be able to trace their stories otherwise…” Saad writes in Khajistan’s doctrine. “This is how we make sure that no particular class or state dictates how art and culture should be preserved. Or seen. Or exist.”