This article is taken from the October 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

He was a pro-colonialist and misogynist. That’s the not-inaccurate line on V. S. Naipaul nowadays. A less established writer would find it a hard charge to shake. But Naipaul won a Nobel Prize, which will always ensure him a readership.

The books of his little brother Shiva, on the other hand, have never had the acclaim they deserve. The association with V. S. could put readers off entirely, but they would be missing out. In his obituary for Shiva, who died in 1985 aged just 40, Martin Amis wrote, “The moment I finished his first novel, Fireflies [1970], I felt delight in being alive at the same time as such a writer … there are many people with whom I can initiate a long train of quotation — and laughter — from that book alone … In losing him, we have lost 30 years of untranscribed, of vanished genius.”

He was also a very different person from his elder brother. Vidia grew up under the spell of his father Seepersad, the man he would immortalise as Mr Biswas. Shiva, who was 13 years younger, had a matriarchal upbringing: “My father died when I was seven and I was brought up by and amongst women: my mother and my sisters. At an early age I came to know what there was to know about crinolines, the shapes of skirts and blouses, the various do-it-yourself techniques of styling hair … ”

The female point of view is correspondingly strong in Shiva’s fiction — not something that could ever be claimed of Vidia’s. In the novel based on his parents, Fireflies, the poor cousin of a powerful Indo-Trinidadian family, Baby, is married off to the feckless Ram Lutchman. Baby indulges his affairs. She even manages to convince herself that he is a great man, though he is hopeless at everything.

Similar delusions sustain a belief in her family’s greatness, even after its patriarch is humiliated on the political stage. But then what else has she to believe in? As a woman in mid-century Trinidad, she can’t have ambitions of her own; she has no choice but to put her faith in men. The uproarious comedy and aching tragedy of the novel lie in the erosion of that faith.

Tragedy became the more dominant strain in Shiva’s fiction after Fireflies. The Chip-Chip Gatherers (1973) is the story of a small Trinidadian community tyrannised by the wealthy businessman Egbert Ramsaran. If the novel has a lead character, it is Egbert’s son Wilbert, a boy destined to turn into his father. But the characters one remembers are the women: Egbert’s scheming mother-in-law Basdai; his free-spirited second wife Sushila; Sushila’s autodidactic daughter Sita. The only people to stand up to Egbert, they are rare in showing any signs of life at all — most have given up.

There is even less light in Shiva’s third and final novel, A Hot Country (1983). Set in the fictional South American territory of Cuyama, the book centres on Dina, unhappy wife to a member of a faded colonial family. She only married the man “because the act of marriage would, for a while at any rate, push forward the winding road of her life”.

His articles on the deaths of Indira and Sanjay Gandhi are models of good journalism

She “let herself become a mother” because it “extended the road through the wilderness for a few more miles”. Now she has done those things, she feels she has “come to the end of her modest little road”.

In the ten years between The Chip-Chip Gatherers and A Hot Country, Shiva caught the travel bug. North of South (1978) is an account of his time in East Africa. Like the country of his birth, Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia had all recently gained independence.

They also had in common with Trinidad significant, and significantly oppressed, Indian populations. In visiting them he sought answers pertinent to both: “How wide is the gap between the rhetoric of liberation and its day-to-day manifestations?”

His conclusions are not kind: “Only lies flourished here. Africa was swaddled in lies — the lies of an aborted European civilisation; the lies of liberation. Nothing but lies.” But there is no question of him defending colonialism, as there is with Vidia.

There were also frequent trips to Asia in these years, always an odd sort of homecoming for a descendant of indentured Indian labourers. As he wrote in North of South: “in what sense could I be called an Indian — a Hindu? I could not speak a word of any Indian language — English was my ‘mother’ tongue.”

Despite this outsider status, or perhaps because of it, the writing that came out of these trips is amongst his finest. His articles on the deaths of Indira and Sanjay Gandhi, in particular, are models of good journalism, full of vivid reportage, provocative opinion and a formidably assured grasp of the (very complex) issues.

Other highlights from his collection Beyond the Dragon’s Mouth (1984) include a fascinating portrait of Iran on the eve of revolution, a hilarious account of his experiences in Morocco during Ramadan and a harrowing history of “The Bush Negroes of Surinam”.

There is also “Living in Earl’s Court”, both an important work of Windrush literature and an interrogation of its author’s wanderlust. The year is 1964. Shiva, the recipient of one of Trinidad’s four island scholarships, has come to Britain to study Philosophy, Psychology and Physiology at Oxford (he would later switch to Chinese). Needing a place to stay until term starts, he begins to look for rooms in London, only to be rebuffed again and again on account of his skin colour.

The best he can get is a “charmless cell”, where he feels both cut off from his roots and shut out of the city around him. By the time he leaves three weeks later, he no longer feels he belongs anywhere: “That cell in Earl’s Court initiated a nomadism which has persisted into the present and which shows no signs of abating.” It is as if he has no choice but to travel.

The only other book Shiva published in his lifetime was Black and White (1980). On 18 November 1978, some 900 men, women and children, all members of the Peoples Temple cult, died in the Guyanese jungle from cyanide poisoning. The event was said by their leader Jim Jones to be an act of “revolutionary suicide”, but in fact many had been coerced.

In the years since, the Jonestown Massacre has been the subject of countless books and documentaries. Black and White was one of the first — Shiva was at the site of the massacre within two weeks. Besides, it isn’t just another retelling of what happened. Instead it looks at those who enabled Jones, namely the Guyanese authorities and American counterculture. The result is a gripping, paranoid, deeply disturbing inquiry into the dangers of belief and the ubiquity of corruption.

Guyana left a mark on Shiva. When asked by his father-in-law if he’d ever write comically again, Shiva replied, “How can I? I have walked over the bodies of Jonestown.” Still, he retained his curiosity: at the time of his death he was writing a book about Australia, published in fragment form in the posthumous collection An Unfinished Journey (1986).

He also retained his immaculate prose style, the thing that makes even his bleakest work a joy to read. It’s just a shame there wasn’t more. For a time his flame was kept alive by the Spectator travel writing prize named after him, but in the absence of new books it flickered out. Now he is a footnote in his brother’s story and largely out of print. He deserves so much better.