We ended up writing a custom jquery library called pjaxr inspired by pjax. Find more about it here:
https://github.com/iekadou/django-pjaxr
We also wrote a Django specific implementation:
https://github.com/iekadou/django-pjaxr
Pjaxr uses pushState which is seo friendly. For browsers that don't support pushState pjaxr fully degrades to normal static html.