His Work : Dealing with the conceptual contradictions
The time and place of his birth are peculiarly suited to his success. An India placed between modernity and feudalism, with its sharp divisions of modern and archaic and rich and poor, calls out for a man like Vishwanath Pratap Singh who bridges the divide. He has realized how in the process of liberating himself from the shackles of his past, he has also liberated himself in art from the need to appropriate things.

There is an exquisite watercolour of his ‘Animal Head’ that makes this statement convincingly. It is the skull of a goat. This is important, as he has drawn lovely drawings of goats in his works of the early seventies. Now he goes beyond the animals he wishes to possess and exclaims that all possessions decay and pass away.

Having come to this position, it is only one step forward to the art of expression, to dealing with the conceptual contradictions of one’s inner and outer realities. This he does in a number of works, but the most powerful is the drawing of a small man casting two large shadows on a wall.

This reminds one of the state of mind in his poem “Anonymous” that of being confronted with a choice of being a great shadow of himself or himself alone. Unlike the poem, the drawing shows the little man casting both shadows. He is in control of their movements. He owns both of them, not only one. Here the artist does not choose only one, as the world wants him to. He seems to grasp both horns of the dilemma of physical reality of one’s being and its social impact.

In a crisis-ridden and class-divided society this impact can only be divided. And every individual sees this division becoming more and more unbearable within oneself. It has to be coped with. And more than that, to be dealt with. Indeed, it is in his art more than in his political life or his poetry, that we see him coming to terms with this basic fact.

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