Making Sense-Memory of Praetorian Pakistan in Mohammed Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes (2009)

Mohammed Hanif′s. (2008). A Case of Exploding Mangoes. Penguin Books is a satirical narrative about the 1988 plane crash that killed General Zia-ul-Haq, blending fact and fiction through Colonel Ali Shigri’s quest for vengeance. The novel critiques Zia’s military authoritarian regime, highlighting how military nationalism represses social agency and manipulates cultural meanings in an authoritarian state. Taking this into perspective, the paper examines how tyrant nationalism during General Zia-ul-Haq’s regime in Pakistan, as portrayed in Mohammed Hanif’s novel, offers an alternative reality of the authoritarian state through sensorial perceptions. The paper also aims to explore several facets of the praetorian nature of the state, such as its overbearing control over sensation, memory, and national identity, which represses social agency. In this sense, the paper is guided by two primary research questions: first, how control operates in Zia-ul-Haq’s Pakistan, and second, how authoritarian regimes regulate sensory perceptions and their concomitant memories. Furthermore, by examining the hypermasculine excess and Islamic influences of Zia’s rule, the paper critiques Pakistan’s military dominance, focusing on power dynamics and collective memory in a state overshadowed by military control. Rather than eliciting sympathy, this work foregrounds the semantic representations of power and the affect-memory mechanisms that disrupt the perpetrator-victim asymmetry in a praetorian regime.