Khajistan is a Brooklyn-based archival collective founded in 2021 that preserves censored and suppressed media from South Asia and the Middle East, including cassettes, posters, and magazines from Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan.
Khajistan runs on the conviction that what gets suppressed tells you more than what gets preserved. Founded in 2021 by Lahore-born filmmaker and archivist Saad Khan, the New York-based collective digs into the print, film, and audio ephemera that state censors, colonial administrators, and the lopsided internet have pushed toward oblivion: cassettes, mujra posters, erotic Urdu digests, airdropped psyops leaflets, discontinued magazines from Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan. Its physical holdings, housed in a special collection called Toshakhana, include the world's largest archive of Pakistani film memorabilia alongside Islamicate Judaica and American war propaganda. Khajistan keeps asking the same question from every angle: whose history gets to exist, and who decided?
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