Manto was a victim of some kind of social ambivalence that converged on self-righteousness, hypocrisy, and mental obtuseness. His detractors branded him as vulgar and obscene and implicated him into a long-dawn legal battle questioning the moral validity of his writings. Without being deterred by their negative tactics, he remained firm in his commitment to exploring the stark realities of life offensive to the conservative taste of some self-styled purists. In the line of Freud, he sought to unravel the mysteries of sex not in an abstract, non-earthly manner but in a palpable, fleshy permutation signifying his deep concern for the socially disabled and depressed classes of society, like petty wage-earners, pimps, and prostitutes.
For Manto, man is neither an angel nor a devil, but a mix of both. His middle and lower middle class characters think, feel and act like human beings. Without feigning virtuosity, he was able to strike a rapport with his readers on some of the most vital sociomoral issues concerning them. As a realist, he was fully conscious of the yawning gap between appearance and reality; in fact, nothing vexed him more than a demonstrable duality in human behaviour at different levels of the social hierarchy. He had an unjaundiced view of man’s faults and follies. As a literary artist, he treated vulgarity discreetly --- without ever sounding vulgar in the process. Like Joyce, Lawrence, and Caldwell, in Manto’s work too, men and women of the age find their own restlessness accurately mirrored. And like them, Manto was also ‘raised above his own self by his sombre enthusiasm’.
