He was ignored and did not find a place in the mainstream men of letters in literary circles. Similar was his state in Cinema where his films could not emerge as successful films at the box office. Not deterred by the criticism, he draws the lineage of similar authors and film makers to make his stand strong and justified:

Critics and connoisseurs may sneer at me as a propagandist and pamphleteer, but the tradition of social comment and “commitment” in literature (or the Arts) is at least as old as Cervantes, Tolstoy, Emile Zola, Hemingway, Steinbeck, our own Tagore, Sarat Chandra Chatterjee, Subramaniam Bharti and Prem Chand, and in the field of films it goes back to Griffith and Einstein, Capra, John Ford and Chaplin, the earlier Shantaram andmuch of the work of Satyajit Ray. If I am guilty, I have the consolation of being in distinguished company. (63)

Abbas was fully aware of the strengths of fiction as a medium and film as another. He was also conscious of the limitations of a director who endeavored to transform a piece of fiction into a film. Many of his novels and short stories were used to make important films. While writing about those stories he never said that they were stories of such and such film. He would rather call them as stories or novels on which a particular film was based. In the present era of serious research on the phenomenon of scripts being transformed into films, it would be pertinent to look at some of