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Published date: 15th-31st Dec 1977, Onlooker

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Fourteen years younger than VS Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul was born in 1945 in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, and was educated in Trinidad and Oxford. He began writing in college, and his short stories were accepted for Penguin Modern Stories 4. His first novel, Fireflies, was published at the end of 1971. and his second, The Chip-Chip Gatherers, appeared in 1973. Both won British literary awards. Mr. Naipaul writes regularly for the Spectator in London.  

He was sipping coffee at the Shamiana when we located him in the Taj in Bombay. Chubby, vaguely Moraes-ish in appearance, wearing octagonal-framed glasses, Naipaul, 32, was rather reluctant to be interviewed. “I prefer remaining anonymous,” he had said on the phone, “but let’s have coffee together anyway.”  

ONLOOKER: What are you doing in Bombay right now?  

Naipaul: I’ve come here to write an article on Bombay for Geo, a German magazine. I’ll be spending around four weeks in all here. I’d last come here on a longer visit to India three and a half years back.  

ONLOOKER: Are any significant changes apparent in the city? 

Naipaul: No. What surprises me is that there is very little change. For a metro-polis, Bombay doesn’t change fast. The decor in this restaurant, for instance, is the same as on my last visit! I’ve wandered through streets and visited friends’ apartments, and they look the same as ever!  

Onlooker: After Fireflies and The Chip-Chip Gatherers, have you written any new novel?  

Naipaul: Yes, my third book, which will appear this spring, is based in East Africa, and is about the relationships between Black and White and Brown. Although I have touched on the Indians settled in East Africa, I don’t talk about them all the time. (The novel, titled North of South-An African Journey, will be published by Andre Deutsch).  

ONLOOKER: What kind of a following do you have back home in Trinidad?  

Naipaul: None.  

ONLOOKER: Do you mean to say that nobody there reads you?  

Naipaul: It’s just that I’ve been out of touch with Trinidad. I’ve been there only once in the last 13 or 14 years which means that I’ve spent more time in India than back home! I’ve been in London all the time.  

ONLOOKER: What sort of writing do you do in London?  

Naipaul: I write quite often for British magazines and papers, but most of them don’t come here at all-I don’t write for well-known journals like the New Statesman, for instance. But it’s quite tough out there, like it is anywhere else. Writers don’t get paid princely fees for their work, you know!  

ONLOOKER: Have you experienced a conflict with your origins, your racial origins, in London? Have you experienced dilemmas like those afflicting our writers-in-exile, like Sasthi Brata?  

Naipaul: I think such prejudices and attitudes tend to narrow one’s vision, and I refuse to be defined by such narrow concerns. If one gets obsessed with such things, one’s life gets narrowed down. I think the world’s a much larger place than that. I’ve never had any problems of that kind.  

ONLOOKER: What influence has your brother (VS Naipaul) had on your writing? Naipaul: There has inevitably been some influence, but I don’t think I’ve consciously tried to follow in his foot-steps. For instance, I haven’t dwelt so much on India, on our origins, although I do include references to such things in my novels.  

ONLOOKER: How would you describe the racial scene in London? Do you think the Indian immigrants are to blame to a large extent?  

Naipaul: Although I don’t live in South-hall, I can look at it quite objectively, and I think the main problem has been that Indian immigrants are not ‘immigrants’ in the true sense-unlike the early immigrants in the US, for example, who cut off most of their ties with their mother countries, Indians continue to lead an old way of life in Britain-they live in England within the curbs of that old life.  

They’ve taken India with them, instead of being new men in the New World.  

When I hear of young Indian girls running away from home, staying in hostels, avoiding arranged marriages there, I wonder whether such escape is liberation or disintegration. If I go into a Sikh temple in Southhall, for instance, London just doesn’t seem to exist outside its walls! The Indians in Britain are merely leading old lives in a new place. Their vision, like I said before, has, narrowed down tremendously. Sometimes, – wonder what effect this will have on the younger generation there, on the next generation. Will they end up as miserable as waifs, orphans?  

ONLOOKER: Has the fact that there are very few, or almost no, novelists in English from the younger generation here struck you?  

Naipaul: Yes, it has, I think it’s because the standard of English here is very low. I think that a lot of people you’d expect to write and speak good English, like those in newspapers, don’t make sense most of the time. It’s quite appalling in a way! Sometimes I get the feeling that English is a dying language out here.