A literary group in Lahore, called Halqa-i-Arbab-i-Funoon-i-Latifa, has been carrying out monthly sittings at the Cosmopolitan Club for years without ever caring to publicise them. But often the participants engage in discussions about a literary topic very relevant to our times and hence needs to be taken notice of.

This month in particular such a topic was being heatedly discussed — the question of how to distinguish genuine literature from a variety of writings ostensibly presented under this nomenclature, while their literary value remains open to question. To be more precise, how to draw a clear-cut line between what is genuine and what is fake in literature.

It was a long drawn-out discussion and the group remained far from reaching a conclusion acceptable to all. That is understandable. Creative expression carries with it no boundaries and meanings are never fixed. Therein lies its charm. And at the same time, there lies the rub.

But the question, as stated above, is very relevant. The genuine has always suffered at the hands of the fake. And the fake has always flourished at the cost of the genuine. It is more so in our times. It seems that literature is under a great siege. Ideologies, a dictator’s obsessions, commercialisation, and most of all, the media — these are the great forces of our times. They all seem to have laid siege to literature. They all appear to be dictating their own terms to writers, expecting them to conform and be moulded.

One participant talked about his perplexity when trying to draw a line between popular fiction and serious fiction as he finds that at times a serious fiction writer too gains popularity. It was pointed out to him that the popularity of a serious fiction writer has its limits. When popular, he remains confined to the world of serious readers and hardly crosses the frontiers of this world to have access to the readers of popular fiction. In spite of his popularity, he remains estranged from the readers of popular fiction, also called pulp fiction. So his popularity stands distinct from that of a popular fiction writer.

The difference lies in the fact that the popular writer keeps an eye on the demands of the market and readily adjusts with it. The serious writer, on the other hand, remains faithful to the call of his creative self, never yielding to the demands of forces other than his own creative self.

A crisis developed in this respect soon after Partition when Manto insisted on writing strictly in accordance to his inner creative voice. This soon brought him in conflict, on one side with the policies of the Pakistani establishment and on the other with the ideological dictates coming from the Progressive Writers’ Movement, which, being the custodian of a commanding ideology was in its own way a force to be reckoned with. So now Manto found himself caught between Scylla and Charybdis.

To save the independence of a writer he was now compelled to fight on two fronts. There comes a time in the life of a writer, of course a writer strictly faithful to his creative self, when he is left alone to stand against the whole society, which cannot reconcile with the idea of the independence of a writer even when believing in the concept of freedom of expression.

The age we are now living in is of a different ilk. It is now commercialism which has now grown into a big force, almost an all- embracing force, trying to take each and everything into its fold. For a popular writer, as defined above, it is a situation of smooth sailing. He was already engaged in writing with an eye on the market. But the one who is really a writer is now in trouble. How to escape from the growing clutches of this monster? That is the question of our times which has become a big challenge for writers.

This is a global situation, not a local one. The 20th century dawned with great expectations. It brought into fore literary giants, whose voices seemed to cross the frontiers of the continents. That age has elapsed. The era of literary giants has receded, perhaps never to come back. Now in this global age literature is direly engaged in the fight for survival. All the newly-emerged forces, ranging from jihadism to the media, are arrayed against it.