What is Khajistan?

Around 6 AM on a moderately hot, late May morning in Lahore, I am travelling to Badami Bagh Bus Stand in an Uber, and just after crossing the railway station, owing to some construction work going on the road, the driver has to stop and take an alternative route. The air is still and warm and the sun is plummeting through the car windows. As we drive past the construction site, there are a couple of young boys drawn in the process of making a TikTok video in the middle of the rubble. The Uber driver looks at them, laughs, and suddenly seethes with rage.

 “We watch their video, and that encourages them to make more,” he tells me, “the only way to stop this shit is by not watching them, by not encouraging them, or by banning it altogether.”

In a half-awake, slow murmur, I inquire why he thinks that. “It’s against our national culture,” he responds. 

The ride ends. I sit by the bus window and start thinking about the national culture of Pakistan – whether culture can be a tall, singular, all-encompassing entity, something that assumes the proportion of a mythical giant, something we have to praise, protect, feed, defend, be afraid of, and wear on our sleeves at all costs. Who gets to define what national culture is and what is not? What kind of art finds breathing space under the regime of national culture? Does national culture stand on erasure and hazy forgetfulness? And most importantly, how can a TikTok video of two young boys threaten its sanctity? To find answers to some of my questions, I start obsessing over the Khajistan Archive. 

Unfolding as a material and digital archive, an internet haven, to a wide selection of podcasts and written work covering a great swath of central and south Asia, the Khajistan archive challenges the notion of a fixed, singular culture, which is more often than not a product of bourgeois disaffections. It transports you into strange and surreal corners of places you never knew existed, rejecting the mythical giant that hovers over us in the form of national culture. While the mainstream media and cultural corridors are deeply invested in a fixed, unnecessarily sanitised portraiture of our lives, which in reality only exists in the imagination of the elite and the powerful, Khajistan au contraire reaffirms my belief that we live in a place where the sublime is interrupted by the inane, the subversive is elevated by the vulgar, the ordinary is touched by the divine, and where the monsoon rains follow the imagination of saints and come earlier than predicted. 

Over the years since my first interaction with the Khajistan Archive, it has grown and carved out a significant repository of lost or banned or ignored histories. A monumental effort has gone into collecting the background score of over 500 Lollywood films from the 1950s to 1980’s, most of which was arranged by an obscure Punjabi Christian band The Stylish Batch. The scores typically run from 20 to 45 minutes for each film. The band responsible for arranging those scores sank into oblivion without a trace, so much so that no information about them is available on the web. By compiling the background score, the Khajistan Archive not only draws our attention towards the sounds of those films, but also the people behind creating those unique sounds and scores, the obscure men of The Stylish Batch, the invisible shadows trapped in the labyrinth of history. 

Growing up in the 2000’s Pakistan meant that there was nothing normal about our childhood. When we were supposed to be stealing posters from low-budget CD shops, we were counting the number of bombs that were being dropped on our country by America every day. Existing in a state of perpetual national emergency left us pondering over what to celebrate, watch, and dance for. When things got a little stable at the back end of the decade, new films and new film stars started emerging, and we were told that whatever little remained of the old Lollywood amounted to the dross that should be discarded from our national memory; that we are on the verge of producing the first great film(s) to come out of Pakistan. Little did we know that it was not an evolution, but an overhaul; a hasty but new imagination that refused to look at and feel the rhythms of history. The cultural machinery, controlled and run by the state and its pious bureaucrats, only preserved what best served the state’s project of manufacturing a single national identity. We were moving towards something without knowing where we were coming from. It almost felt like severing ties with the past had become one of our favourite pastime activities. 

To preserve whatever remains of the old lollywood, the Khajistan archive has also acquired materials such as rare film posters from independent collectors like the Guddu Film Archive, one of the largest film archives in the country. Most of those are Punjabi and Pashto films, which were largely produced for the consumption of working-class people. And as far as the themes of those films are concerned, they ranged from risqué to horror, from action thrillers to romance, films that had room for the other and the otherized, the funk and the dynamic, films that portrayed subversive practices rooted in indigenous experiences; of the times when we were a little less afraid of each other’s dance moves. The cinema of that particular era was very much concerned with the aesthetical, political, and social questions of its times, and more importantly it was entertainment for all, largely free from the influence of the powerful elite and architects of national culture. 

Apart from the abandoned histories of Lollywood, the Khajistan Archive has also collected thousands of magazines from the 1950’s to 1990’s. Most of those magazines either ceased publication owing to financial constraints or were banned under dictatorships and faux democracies. Some are children’s magazines, others feature erotic tales written under pseudonyms, and there are also various issues of film magazines like Eastern Film Magazine and Aar Paar, along with 54 issues of Musavvir, a weekly Urdu art and films magazine that published from Bombay in the 1930’s and 1940’s. There are an astonishing 750 issues of Akhbar-e-Khawateen from 1964 to 1986, a prominent feminist magazine in Urdu that featured essays and stories by women, giving them a platform to write about and challenge patriarchal norms. Such a collection of rare magazines and posters is not confined to Pakistan either, as similar materials from Iran, Afghanistan and Turkey have also been acquired and digitised, showing the Archive’s broader commitment towards preservation of lost knowledge in the Islamicate world. 

Using literature as a device, Urdu magazines like Lail o Nehar and Naqoosh—which have also been part of the Khajistan Archive’s digital collection—raised critical social and intellectual questions, abridging the gap between the written word and the material conditions of a people grappling with life under a neocolonial system of exploitation and control soon after the horrors of partition. While saving these old publications from erasure, Khajistan also preserves their typographical identity, conserving and unearthing the non-standardized, flamboyant fonts that showcase the variegated richness and influence of a particular cultural landscape from which they have emerged. 

Excavating the internet for those on the margins is Khajistan’s digital archive – a surreal mix of everything housed on a single Instagram page conduit to a more extensive section on their website. From updates regarding the worst power outages in district lower Dir to muscular men half-nude and posing for photoshoots. The unfettered and unfiltered dance moves of showgirls and showboys of Pakistan. Popular memes. Innocent jokes. Special programs. Kabbadi players. Signs of God. Posters about much-anticipated dog fights. Photoshopped images of celebrity butts. Hair oil commercials. You open either digital portal, and you cannot anticipate what Khajistan will throw at you. It could be anything. You can’t define the content using your convenient binaries. It’s subversive, political, funny, and thought-provoking simultaneously. 

Khajistan is a radical praxis of archiving, a parallel internet space that documents the lesser-known and the lesser-seen, the lost and abandoned, and just acknowledges people’s right to take ownership of their own lived experiences. It essentially shows that no matter what the national culture and its saviours say, no matter what the remnants of colonial legal systems imply, no one can tell us how to live, breathe, and feel joy. The culture and the art – so too life – refuse to breathe within the constraints of moral convictions enforced upon us under the garb of nationalism and national culture. 

We shall continue to be a surreal mix of everything in a place where the divine, absurd, vulgar, funny, and subversive will continue to immerse and dance in each other’s honour. We are not either this or that or anything that is said and shown about us. Our joys shouldn’t belong to the men of state. What we consume as art shouldn’t be up for any national discourse. To pose threats to upper-class morality, whether it’s through art or the way we dress up on certain nights, is an act of resistance and honesty. And on some afternoons, when I open the Khajistan Archive, it whispers these words in my ears: when it’s not safe out there, we do not disappear, we only hide, lurk around the corners, and patiently stare at avenues that we shall make less lonely with our art and acts of love.