Shiva Naipaul : A Genius Forgotten and Overshadowed
In Europe and America, there is a wonderful concept of sharing books. Read a book, put it in a mini library in some park or any public space for others to read. No storing in homes. No book packed almirahs in apartments. These mini libraries display a notice: “Drop a book, pick up one.” It is through these libraries that I pick up books and read. Buying is unaffordable here.
It is here that I picked up Kafka, Balzac, Marcel Proust, Schopenhauer, Milan Kundera and reread them. It is through one such library that I picked up "North of South" by Shiva Naipaul. I have always liked Shiva’s writing and observation power. His sentences are clean. His eye is unsparing. I read and returned it faithfully, apart from dropping some books that were with me from India into the same box for someone else to find.
The spine of Shiva's book had faded. The name on the cover meant nothing to most people who passed that box. Everyone knows V.S. Naipaul. Nobel Prize. A House for Mr Biswas. In a Free State. A Bend in the River. A towering figure, impossible to ignore. A name with a reputation that filled rooms before he entered them. His younger brother, Shiva, was equally brilliant. And he was overshadowed by the huge, overpowering image of his elder brother.
Writing came to the Naipaul brothers from their father, Seepersad Naipaul, a journalist for the Trinidad Guardian. He wrote sketches of Indian life in Trinidad with a quiet, precise sympathy, and the sons grew up watching him turn observation into sentences.
The Naipauls trace their origins to a Brahmin family from the hills of Uttar Pradesh. Under British rule they were sent as indentured labour to work the cane fields of Trinidad and Tobago. In three generations that line moved from those fields to a newsroom and then to Oxford. A reporter with a notebook came first. Then came two sons whose books travelled far. That journey from UP to the Caribbean, from cane fields to lecture halls, lies beneath all that they wrote. It accounts for both the detachment and the intimacy in their view.
Shiva Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1945. He followed his elder brother V.S. to Oxford. He might have chosen the easier road. He might have written about home and exile and identity in the manner that was fashionable and praised in the 1970s. He did not. He took a notebook and bought a ticket instead. At that time the world spoke a great deal about socialism and liberation and revolution. The words looked neat on posters. Few people bothered to see what they did to everyday life. Shiva went to see.
North of South: An African Journey, published in 1978, is the account of that seeing. Africa, he observed, is treated in the former imperial West as something to be handled with care, as something fragile and to be turned the right way up. It was a topic much discussed and seldom described with accuracy, because accuracy would disturb the mood. So Shiva went himself. He travelled through postcolonial East Africa to learn what those grand ideas actually meant for ordinary Africans. The book presents two pictures of postcolonial Africa, and neither flatters. That is why the book mattered.
First he arrived in what was then Zaire, nominally independent yet still bound to Belgium, its former ruler, by trade and habit. The flags had changed. The agreements had not. From there he went to Kenya, held up as a pro Western, pro capitalist model. There he saw an African elite driving Mercedes and building great estates, copying the white settlers who had come before them. Independence had not ended imitation. It had only changed the hands doing it.
Later he went to Tanzania, the counterpoint to Kenya. It was a one party socialist state, and its leader Julius Nyerere was much admired by the international Left. There were villagisation programmes and talk of ujamaa and self reliance. Yet the shops were empty. The bureaucracy was ponderous. The distance between speech and reality was wide. He also visited Zambia, formerly Northern Rhodesia, a country oddly detached from its supposed role at the forefront of the fight against white supremacy. The slogans were everywhere. On the ground people were occupied with getting through the week.
He did not write out of disgust. He wrote out of attention. He noticed how a minister spoke, where a road stopped, how aid money vanished into concrete that never set. He would not romanticise poverty. He would not lay all blame at the door of colonialism and leave it there. Nor would he claim that Western capitalism was the answer. He looked, and he recorded what he saw.
The response was confusion. To the Left he seemed a traitor for refusing to idealise. To call something dysfunctional, they said, was to hand weapons to racists. To the Right he was of little use, because he would not turn Africa into a simple lesson about the failure of independence. Shiva was after something less tidy. He wanted to describe what was actually happening.
Shiva’s bibliography is brief, yet each title has force. He began with two Trinidad novels. Fireflies in 1970 examines a middle class Indian family coming apart under ambition. The Chip-Chip Gatherers in 1973 is a dark comedy about class and religion and the desire for status in a small society. Then came the non fiction that defined him. North of South in 1978 recorded his African travels. Black and White in 1980 studied a murder trial in Trinidad and used it to explore race and law and gossip. His final book, A Hot Country in 1983, took him to Guyana and across the Caribbean to examine politics and poverty and the long shadow of empire. He also contributed sharp journalism and travel pieces to places such as The New York Review of Books, always with the same clear and unflinching gaze.
In India, where he travelled and reported, he found readers and friends who valued his refusal to flatter. One of them was Khushwant Singh, writer and editor, a man with no time for piety. Singh had his own reputation for plain speaking, and he recognised in Shiva a similar temperament, a writer who would not dress reality to make it more acceptable. They met and talked and argued. In Delhi and Bombay literary circles Shiva mixed with journalists and authors who were weary of slogans and who wanted prose that faced the country directly, without apology and without romance.
The City Journal would later describe Shiva and V.S. as truth tellers of our time. Not because they were cynical, but because they would not lie to make an ideology comfortable. Shiva’s method was straightforward. Go. Look. Write what you see. Do not turn away because it is inconvenient. Do not soften it to please friends at home. Do not add fine words to make it nobler. He paid a price for this. He lived in that awkward middle ground where truth telling occurs. He was not a cheerleader, so no one could claim him. He was not a reactionary, so no one could dismiss him. He was simply a writer determined to describe the world as it was.
During my stay in the US, I reread Shiva after Marcel Proust and Kundera. If Proust teaches us time., Kundera teaches irony. Read him to know that he teaches something fundamental ; to look at harsh, uncomfortable truths directly, without turning away or pretending they aren’t there. He died in 1985, at 40, of a heart attack. He died young leaving behind five books and a way of looking.
I had picked up "North of South" from a wooden box in the Van Vorst Park, Jersey City . It is again there . Certainly , waiting for someone else to find it.
( Avtar Mota )
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