Shiva Naipaul (1946–1985)

"It was at this time, when the tide was out, that the beds of chip-chip were exposed and squadrons of women and children from the village would come down to the beach armed with buckets and basins to gather the harvest of shells. The women wore petticoats but the smaller children would be naked. Separate working parties fanned out along the beach. Squatting on their haunches, they labored long and assiduously, shoveling and raking over the wet sand with their hands; filling the buckets and show more basins with their pink and yellow shells which were the size and shape of a long fingernail. Inside each was the sought-after prize: a miniscule kernel of insipid flesh. A full bucket of shells would provide them with a mouthful. But they were not deterred by the disproportion between their labours and their gains. Rather, the very meagreness of their reward seemed to spur them on. Quarrels were frequent, their chief cause being the intrusion of an alien group into the staked-out territory of another. Some of these border conflicts could flare into violence. Tempers sparked easily in the scorching sun."

The chip-chip, formally known as Donax variabilis, is a tiny edible mollusk which populates the Eastern United States and the Caribbean. The meat from these sea creatures is considered to be a delicacy in Trinidad, the country in which Shiva Naipaul’s second novel is set. The chip-chip serves as excellent metaphor for the poor inhabitants of the island: their lives are “nasty, brutish and short”, as they struggle against both the recurrent waves that wash them from their sea bed communities, and the birds and humans that thoughtlessly consume them en masse.

The Chip-Chip Gatherers, the winner of the 1973 Whitbread Prize, is set in the Settlement, a community of poor Indians that is so insignificant that it doesn’t appear on any maps of Trinidad. The dominant character is Ashok (Egbert) Ramsaran, a ruthless and eccentric tyrant whose successful trucking company and extortionary money lending business has made him the most powerful man in the community. Egbert is a self made man who turned his back on his aimless parents and wayward brothers, and he refuses to lift a finger to help them or anyone else. He has one son, Wilbert, who he grooms to take over the business after his death. Despite his wealth, Egbert adamantly refuses to provide his son with a formal education, as he views doctors and lawyers as lying cheaters, and he regularly belittles and harangues Wilbert into submission.

His estranged best friend from childhood, Vishnu Bholai, works as the community’s local grocer, after failing in his dream to become a lawyer. Vishnu’s strikingly handsome and rather vain son Julian is a promising student who plans to gain a scholarship to England to pursue a career in medicine. Vishnu seeks reconciliation with Egbert, and fervently desires for Wilbert and Julian to become close friends, but the boys, like their fathers, have little in common.

Egbert’s long suffering and nearly invisible wife Rani dies of a heart attack, which initially provides her husband with relief and freedom. However, he soon finds himself lonely, as he has no friends and has lost his only companion. Rani’s mother Basdai, realizing that her financial link to Ramsaran has been severed upon her daughter’s death, cleverly creates a plan to keep her monetary pipeline intact. She cajoles her wayward niece Sushila, who is strikingly attractive and single, to offer her services as a housemaid to Egbert, and lure him into taking her on as his mistress. Sushila has a daughter out of wedlock named Sita, a moody, bookish and determined girl who also strives to escape the influence of Basdai, her daughters and daughters-in-law, and her mother, who left her in the care of Basdai to seek favors in the larger cities of San Fernando and Port of Spain. Basdai’s plan is successful at first, but ultimately she derives no benefit from it, and later the relationship between Egbert and Sushila takes a tragic turn that has wide ramifications on the others.

The main characters are linked by their ruthless desire to escape from the others in the community in order to achieve success, like a crab that seeks to crawl out of a barrel while the others pull him back in. Love and happiness are viewed as foolish pursuits that only lead to failure. They are desperate and fatalistic, and their extreme individualism blinds them toward any thoughts of working with each other to achieve common goals.

The Chip-Chip Gatherers is a deceptively simple novel, filled with humor and pathos, compelling characters, and evocative descriptions of the Settlement and its inhabitants. Shiva Naipaul mines the same fertile soil as his far more successful older brother Vidya (V.S.) did in his novels A House for Mr. Biswas and The Mystic Masseur, but this novel stands on its own and is a unique and captivating view of a postcolonial culture that is nearly the equal of Vidya’s early novels. Sadly, Shiva died of a heart attack in 1985 at the age of 40 and did not achieve much recognition or success during his lifetime, but hopefully the recent reissuing of The Chip-Chip Gatherers by Penguin Classics (UK), along with his 1970 debut novel Fireflies, will permit a new generation of readers to experience and enjoy the work of this talented and largely forgotten writer. show less

Shiva Naipaul died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of forty. He had published three novels, two travel books and two story collections before that. This posthumous collection brings together material from the last year or so of his life: two chapters from a projected travel book on Australia, four essays — one on his relationship with his brother Vidia, one on the artificiality of the notion of “the third world”, and two on Indian politics at the time of the assassination of show more Indira Gandhi — together with the opening of another travel book, on Sri Lanka.

During his lifetime he didn‘t get a very favourable reception from the critics: some compared him unfavourably to his brother, others criticised both of them for having absorbed too many British, colonial attitudes. But he has had something of a revival since his death, and this collection seems to bear out the idea that he deserves to be seen as more than the “unlucky little brother”.

The prose is light and elegant, precise without being assertive, and his sympathetic human interest in (most of) the people he is writing about is palpable, as is his constant questioning of his own standing as an observer and his attempt to work out where he stands, somewhere between his Indian heritage, Caribbean upbringing and British higher education. Confronted with communal violence in Indian and Sri Lanka, he feels slightly at a loss having grown up without any coherent religious education or convictions — his family were only very nominal Hindus. But he is clearly someone whose drive is always to find ways to see and represent other people as human individuals, irrespective of any labels of race or community they may attach to themselves.

Even his status in relation to Vidia is hard to pin down — with a thirteen year age gap, Shiva barely knew his elder brother before he went off to study in England, and heard his voice only when one of his stories was broadcast on the BBC. Shiva spent his schooldays being told that he wasn’t the bigshot who had gone off to England and published books, so there must have been a certain masochism in his (unplanned, as he describes it) invention of himself as a novelist and travel writer in his own right. It sounds as though the brothers never had much to do with each other, but after his death Vidia wrote kind things about him and suggested that Shiva, had he lived, would have been seen as the greater of the two. Of course, you can say things like that if you’re on track for the Nobel…

The Australian pieces show Shiva in a slightly awkward light, and give a hint why he wasn’t always flavour of the month with postcolonial critics. He is amusing and relatable when he talks about what he learnt in school about Australia and what Australians learnt about Trinidad (the Pitch Lake). But he lets himself get riled up too easily by what he sees as a modish and hypocritical veneration of an idealised version of Aboriginal culture by urban young people who have no real historical connection to it, and he starts sounding as though he has been infected by a premature case of anti-wokeism.

In Sri Lanka he comes across as much more sensitive and unjudgemental. He writes with real sympathy and feeling about Tissa, a bookaholic civil servant he meets who is trying to make his way as a writer. Tissa is obviously a pathetic figure (especially when we realise that his long-suffering wife actually is a published writer, pumping out magazine stories to keep the family afloat), but Shiva refuses to say anything unkind about him. He also writes sensitively about the communal violence in the island and its effects. It’s sad that he never got to write the rest of the book. show less

This is a chronicle spanning several months travelling in Kenya, Tanzania and Kenya in 1978 as far as I can gather. Shiva Naipaul explains his book thus in his inroduction: "..not...a straightforward travel book or a current affairs book or ...a sociological treatise but (almost) a kind of novel, a montage of people, of places, of encounters seen and interpreted in light of the questions I have outlined..."
Those questions he posed are ones about the gap between liberation rhetoric and its show more day-to-day manifestations, the extent of cynicism, apathy, incomprehension and even fantasy present in these post-independence nations.
At fifty years remove much has changed in East Africa and the impression that one remembers about the ideals of Harambee in Kenya and ujamaa in Nyrere's Tanzania was that they were rallying cries to the new nations but that they were fizzers as far as nation-building principles went.
Naipaul sets aside time for discussing the situation in which "Asians" found themselves after independence. They were not liked at all by Africans and endured hostility to their presence. Important it is to remember that Indians maintained a functioning merchant class while new governments grappled with grand socialist schemes that were inimical to the societies for which they were intended.
Shiva Naipaul is a concise writer; his prose and reportage is spare and clear. The book is easy to read and the narrative does not become ponderous or bogged. In reading this account, it's important to remember that his negative criticisms of much he encounters, stem from the shock of the new status these countries experienced in their post-independent decades.
Poor Shiva Naipaul was not to live long, dying at age forty from a sudden heart attack. show less

This is my third book by Shiva Naipaul, and while his writing remains brilliant, perhaps this doesn't grab the reader as much as his others.
Set in the fictional S American land of Cuyama (presumably Guyana, just across the water from Naipaul's native Trinidad), it's the description of a strange, uncommunicative marriage, against a backdrop of political upheaval. The constitution drawn up by the previous British administrators is now- 21 years after independence- being torn up as the black show more population begin to demand more power.
But this energy and anger is in stark contrast to the St Pierres- husband Aubrey, educated, well-to-do, devoted to atoning for his slave-owning ancestors by such futile gestures as running a spectacularly unsuccessful bookshop and taking in an impoverished local girl... And his wife, Dina, eaten up with resentment? depression? - "the fragile nature of her presence in his life: a presence that resembled a permanent state of absence."
"The degeneration of a colonial past and the brutality of a decolonized future", reads the blurb, and I can't say more than that. Some lovely writing but not madly gripping. show less