Naipaul Shiva

Shiva Naipaul (25 February 1945 – 13 August 1985), born Shivadhar Srivinasa Naipaul in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, was a Trinidadian and British novelist and journalist.

Shiva Naipaul was the younger brother of novelist V. S. Naipaul. He went first to Queen's Royal College and St Mary's College in Trinidad, then emigrated to Britain, having won a scholarship to study Chinese at University College, Oxford. At Oxford, he met and later married Jenny Stuart, with whom he had a son, Tarun[1].

With Jenny's support, Shiva Naipaul wrote his first novel, Fireflies, and followed it with The Chip-Chip Gatherers. He then decided to concentrate on journalism, and wrote two non-fiction works, North of South and Black & White, before returning to the novel form in the 1980s with A Hot Country, a departure from his two earlier comic novels set in Trinidad, as well as a collection of fiction and non-fiction, Beyond the Dragon's Mouth: Stories and Pieces[2]. Both his fiction and nonfiction were characterized by a starkly pessimistic view of Commonwealth societies that attacked the post-imperial native hierarchies for their crassness and mimicry of the West, and in turn the banality and diffidence of Western liberalism.

On the morning of 13 August 1985, at the age of 40, Naipaul had a heart attack while working at his desk[3]. The Spectator Magazine, for whom his wife Jenny had worked as a secretary, and which had published many of his articles, established the since-discontinued Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize.[4]

In his book Sir Vidia's Shadow, Paul Theroux's memoir of Shiva's older brother, V.S Naipaul, Theroux described Shiva as a 'sot', shrunken by the towering figure of his famous brother, with a penchant for drunken partying and a need to have his meals made for him. Theroux also took issue with Shiva's skills as a writer, particularly as a travel writer. Recently, Sir Vidia's Shadow has come under attack for its demonstrable inaccuracies [5].

A radically more positive appreciation of Shiva Naipaul by the journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft in The Spectator [3] is backed up by the novelist Martin Amis, who wrote that Shiva Naipaul was one of those people who caused your heart to lift when he entered the room...in losing him, we have lost thirty years of untranscribed, unvarnished genius[6]

A recent Arena documentary on his brother V. S. Naipaul reproduced footage of Shiva from an earlier documentary from the early 1980s, in which Shiva returned to Trinidad to see his mother [7]