Faiz Ahmad Faiz is presented with a book on Urdu poetry in 1978. Pic/Wikimedia commons

'She does not worship upon the graves of the dead; she tells the stories of the living. She does not build castles in the air; she smelts reality in the clear light of the imagination, then pours it in the sharp and pungent acid of her language and turns it into such a life-like portrait that the reader is completely taken in by the writer's art and skill. At the same time, the reader is left ruing the state of affairs of his society. And so I am always extremely pleased when people shower abuses on Ismat Chughtai because at that time they are actually heaping abuses on themselves... Time and again, Ismat has exposed these double standards and speciousness and employed such a tremendously sarcastic manner that it pierces through these layers like a drill,' wrote noted author Krishan Chander in his foreword to a collection of stories by Chughtai.