Marginality In Manto

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Saadat HassanManto, (1912-1955) is the short story writer of the twentieth century in the language of Urdu. He was a very controversial writer of his times, who faced many court trials because of his so called ‘sex oriented’ expressions. But the fact is that Manto analysed the deep feelings of common men and women and characterized them with most sincere frankness in his writings. In many of his stories, Manto depicted woman as the main character. He brought to the reader how a woman is exploited and used by men for their individual satisfaction. In his stories Manto gives a higher status to certain values and concepts that may roughly be called his vision of life. These values and concepts include- frankness, honesty, the discrepancy between appearance and reality, the validity of sex in life, the ethics of human relations, and the ambiguous nature of reality. The humanity that shines through in his writings is a hallmark of his fictional art and his sympathy with the downtrodden living on the fringes of society is an integral part of his vision.
This essay makes a critical study of the characters found in ‘Insult’ and ‘Mummy’ with the intent of showing how Manto’s stories represents marginality and the notions of morality.
Keywords: societal hypocrisy, sexual exploitation, psychological trauma, quest for identity and human dignity.

INTRODUCTION
Saadat Hassan Manto, belongs to the literary tradition not only of Urdu fiction, but of Hindi, Punjabi and Sindhi as

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