For the love of Manto

Being such an avid fan of the drunk, enigmatic writer, class discussions on whether Manto ‘meant’ to deliberate this or that is unsettling for me. For example, questions on whether he ‘meant’ to ‘attack’ religion in Sahib-e-Karāmaṭ or ‘meant’ to create a certain image of the fallen woman in Hatak are in my opinion not very relevant to Manto's stories.  Instead of trying to attach superficial meanings to Manto’s stories by stripping down what we assume to be 'symbolic' gestures and searching for a ‘deeper’ meaning within the prose, we should try and resign ourselves to a consideration that maybe Manto doesn't try to impose his weltanschauung on his reader like many other Urdu writers nor is trying to be the anti-thesis of Diptee Nazir Ahmed's preachy writing but has another, more significant agenda. Rather than conform to traditional ulterior motives of writing fiction, Manto tries to wholesomely capture the deepest of human emotion, the most intimate of relationships and the most painful of human experiences to pay homage to human suffering through his twisted, but very real, characters. 
Sahib-e-Karāmaṭ is an example of where one might try and dig deeper into Manto’s ‘hate’ for Islamic figures. Frankly however, I believe even if you remove the characters of the fake Moulvi and Mauju and replace it with some other figure – for example a fake Imran Khan and a wannabe-die-hard PTI female fan utterly lost to politics —then the essence of the story will remain. It’s not about degrading Islamic authority but rather bringing a sad realization to the forefront that there is a Mauju in every one of us—we idolize certain ideas to an extent that they achieve a position where they can manipulate us to the extent of ruin. This very human reality is what Manto tries to depict through Mauju and for exposing this very embarrassing truth in this story and his others, he was/is shunned from society.