COLUMN: Some stray thoughts on Manto and his “Hatak” By Muhammad Umar Memon

Saadat Hasan Manto, the iconic figure of Urdu fiction, has had a strange fate: being either idolised or roughed up by his critics. His detractors have found him guilty of pornography. Despite having radically different takes on his fictional corpus, the majority of his lovers and haters share at least one common trait: their critical discourse — if that’s what it is — has little to do with the nature of fiction and, by extension, Manto’s fiction. They have either commended or condemned

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