1985 Shiva(dhar Srivinasa) Naipaul was born in 1945 in Port of Spain, Trinidad. He was one of two sons of the distinguished Trinidadian journalist Seepersad Naipaul, who died when Shiva was seven. His brother V.S. [‘Vidia’] Naipaul was twelve years Shiva’s senior and more influenced by his father. The Naipauls were Indian by origin and their ancestors had come to the Caribbean in the 19th century as indentured labourers. Both the Naipaul sons were emotionally torn between Indian heritage and West Indian upbringing.
Shiva Naipaul had the best school education (with a strong English flavour to it) the island could offer and like his brother before him won a scholarship to study at the University of Oxford. He enrolled for a variety of subjects, none of them with any success. He graduated with a gentleman’s third (in Chinese) in 1968. He had married the year before. It was a year of social upheaval and a period of emotional confusion for Naipaul. As the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) records:
He never truly felt at home anywhere; and so began a rootless and dislocated existence starting in Britain in 1964 where not ‘being straightforwardly Indian or straightforwardly West Indian’ was a confusion that the rest of the world could not deal with.
It was additionally awkward having a novelist brother who had already won himself a distinguished name. Nonetheless, Shiva was determined to write fiction himself. He settled in London and, in 1970, published a novel set in the West Indies, Fireflies. Comparisons with Vidia’s A House for Mr Biswas were inevitable, and not always to Shiva’s advantage. Fireflies nonetheless won prizes and laid the way for another Trinidadian novel, The Chip-Chip Gatherers, which won the Whitbread Prize for that year, 1974.
Naipaul then went silent as an author of fiction for ten years, restricting himself to some short stories and travel writing. The tone of his published work was increasingly bleak and sardonic. It was at its bleakest with his chronicle of the Jonestown massacre, Black and White (1980). A third novel, A Hot Country, was published in 1983 for a fiction readership which had largely forgotten him, if not his surname.
Naipaul was poised on the brink of a major career when, wholly unexpectedly, he died of a thrombosis, shortly after his 40th birthday, on 25 February 1985. The Spectator, a magazine for which he had written over the years (and on which his wife worked), established a prize in his honour. It is, of course, routinely mistaken for an award honouring the achievements of the other, Nobel-winning, Naipaul.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft, who wrote the above ODNB entry, has written elsewhere reflecting on Shiva’s alleged misanthropy:
It’s impossible not to wonder how he would have developed … Vidia has been garlanded with the highest honours, knighthood to Nobel prize, but it would be an exaggeration to say that, while he has grown as a great writer, he has also mellowed into a great liberal philanthropist, and I doubt if Shiva would have done so either. V.S. Naipaul’s sharp critique of Islam is looking rather perceptive at present, but there is no use pretending that he is full of warm sympathy for the Third World, and nor was Shiva.1
1 Spectator, 13 August 2005.