Artist and Activist : Coping with subjective problems
The two shadows are not only firmly rooted in the small individual, they are cast against a wall by a small being. He has no delusion of grandeur. And it is perhaps this concern of art with the fact that behind many great endeavours, there are ordinary everyday people and things. This gives him a concern with street urchins, labourers and even ants. And even in his abstracts one finds a myriad of little forms coming together to bring life to two dimensional surfaces. This close relation with objects and objectivity also moves the artist towards coping with subjective problems as well.

His art moves from the level of mere expressions to that of a challenge. It emerges first in his images of the underdog: streetcorner urchins, the sacrificial goat and the ill-omened crow. Then we see injustice at play: a taxi splashing an urchin with muddy water, a beggar’s foot about to be crushed by a well heeled one. And then resistance, not as a conscious effort, but integral to one’s being. We see this in a drawing of his that shows hand carts arranged like cannons.

The concept is very much like in his poem, “Soot”. Here we see his art carrying him beyond his political life as a young Vinoba acolyte, a member of the UP legislature, the Chief Minister of UP, a Central Cabinet Minister, the Finance Minister and then the Prime Minister. It shows him in the light of a man piling brick on brick in tenements to challenge heartless demolitions, of coming out to resist communal forces, of addressing the all India conference of the Democratic Youth Federation of India in Kerala or campaigning for the Left Front in West Bengal or supporting it in his home constituency of Manda.

It is a long journey from being a scion of the landed aristocracy positioning itself to increase its holdings, to a politician of the party in power, and finally to becoming a citizen of a republic with the ideal of social justice enshrined in its constitution. That Vishwanath Pratap Singh has succeeded in undertaking this journey is to his credit. And it was his activism, his writing and his art that have shielded him in the past as they will in the future too. His tryst with the future is no longer in doubt. It is there for anyone to see and share.

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