Tuesday 19 April 2011

POST IMPERIALISM IN SHIVA NAIPAUL


A Prolific Study

Dr. D. B. Gavani
CONTENTS

I.          Introduction     
II.         Fireflies- Shiva Naipaul
III.       Journey to Nowhere – Black And White          
IV.       The Confrontation of Caste in The Chip Chip Gatherers           
V.        Conclusion      
            Bibliography    


CHAPTER-I
INTRODUCTION
Imperialism is a cultural effect of comprehensive power in the transmission and consumption of ideology that is not adequately registered by colours on a map.1 The term ‘Post-Imperial Studies,’ however, is becoming less meaningful within academic institutions in the way that commonwealth and ‘new literatures’ of the 1970s or and 1980s have already become. As Timothy Brenmen has pointed out, if Britain is seen now as post–colonial too, the nations of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ on which at some point have come under the way of British imperialism are seen as post–colonial, then this term no longer does much useful distinguish work. Such cultures use more likely to be understood in terms of a combination of both post–colonialism and post–imperialism, although what distinguishes these two terms is complex and in determinant.
Over the last few years much has been discussed about Post–Colonialism, but as few are decided on the precise meaning of the term ‘post–imperialism’ it, perhaps this is suitable. One of the dangers problematical in the area of Post–Colonial studies is that it will enact a form of reversal, a discursive de-territoralisation over the territory that the imperial project initially made claim to. There is a assumption that if conceived of in this way there is nothing essentially innovative in the Post–Colonial theoretical enquiry, that it will be misconceived if it sets about to reproduce and refashion the very imperial process that brought into being. There is no going back. We need to be reminded that for an area of discourse that concerns itself with the ‘other’ the ‘subaltern’ the ‘object’, the ‘luminal’, and the marginalized. Post–Colonial theory is not to be found in the process of re- articulating the ‘centre’ or ‘periphery’ of discursive strategies inscribed by the imperial project. Rather, Post–Colonialism is perhaps better conceived of as an articulation of a plurality ‘of centers’ as a re-inscription of a multiplicity of emergent identities.
The post colonial is especially and pressingly concerned with the power that resides in discourse and texuality; its resistance, then, quite appropriately takes place in and from the domain of texuality, in motivated acts of reading The contestation of Post-Colonialism is a contest of representation.’2
“Colonialism is the building and maintaining of colonies in one territory by people from another territory.
Colonialism is a term which refers to the settlement of colonies and migrate there as inhabitant. It is the extension of a nation’s sovereignty over territory by the establishment beyond its borders. It may be either settler colonies or administrative dependencies in which they ruled indigenous populations directly or displaced. Colonialism is often used interchangeably with imperialism.
We may also call the term colonialism to refer to a set of beliefs that are used for the promotion of system often it was based on ethnocentric belief that the morals and values of colonizer were superior and more valuable as compared to colonize.
Colonialism is the control of one nation by ‘transplanted’ people of another nation often a geographically distant nation that has a different culture and dominant racial or ethnic group. Colonialism occurred due to overpopulation, lack of resources. Food, land etc; lack of wealth and for a better opportunity or quality of life.
Colonialism is a direct or indirect control of foreign power over an independent country. A new form of colonialism is called neo – colonialism. This control is economic and cultural, rather than political.
Post–Colonialism.
A term used to describe the study of cultures who have emerged from colonial rule and who are undergoing the processes of decolonization.
Post-Colonialism is a specifically post-modern intellectual discourse that holds together a set of theories found among the texts and sub-texts of philosophy, film, political science and literature. These theories are reactions to the cultural legacy of colonialism.
A single, definitive definition of Post-Colonial theory is controversial; writers have strongly criticized it as a concept embedded in identity politics. Ann Laura Stoler, in Carnal knowledge and Imperial power, argues that the simplistic oppositional binary concept of colonizer and colonizer is more complicated than it seems, since these categories are fluid and shifting.
Post-imperialism or Post-Colonialism deals with cultural identity in colonized societies; the dilemmas of developing a national identity after colonial rule; the ways in which writers articulate and celebrate that identity (often reclaiming it from and maintaining strong connections with the colonizer); The ways in which the knowledge of the colonized (subordinated) people has been generated and used to serve the colonizer’s interest; and the ways in which the colonizer’s literature has justified colonialism via images of the colonized as a perpetually inferior people, society and culture. These inward struggles of identity, history and future possibilities often occur in the metropolis and, ironically with the aid of post–colonial structures of power, such as universities.
The term Post-Colonialism according to a too-rigid etymology is frequently misunderstood as a temporal concept, meaning the time after colonialism has ceased, or the time following the politically determined Independence Day on which a country breaks away from its governance by another state.
Post colonialism is, rather, an engagement with contestation of colonialism’s discourses power structures, and social hierarchies. A theory of Post Colonialism must, then, respond to more than the merely chronological construction of post independence and to more than just the discursive experience of imperialism.
Post Colonial Theory as epistemology, ethics and politics-addresses matters of identity, gender, race, racism and ethnicity with the challenges of developing a post colonial national identity.
Independence and the end of colonialism have not ended social fragmentation and war in the Middle East. Because European colonial powers draw borders discounting peoples, ancient tribal boundaries and local history, the Middle East’s contemporary national identity problem can be traced back to imperialism and colonialism. Like wise, most states in the Persian Gulf were handed over to those who could protect and safeguard imperial interests in the post – withdrawal phase.
The interior of Africa was not colonized until almost the end of the 19th century, yet the impact of colonialism was even more significant to the indigenous cultures, especially because of the scramble for Africa. The increasingly efficient railroad helped European powers to gain control over all regions of Africa, with the British particularly emphasizing goals of conquer.
Many African empires existed in the pre colonial era such as the Ashanti, Ghana Empire, Kongo Kingdom, and Edo Empire. Nigeria was home to the Haussa, Chinua Achebe was among the first to take up this history in the construction of post colonial identity.
“The final hour of colonialism has struck and millions of inhabitants of Africa, Asia and Latin America rise to meet a new life and demand their unrestricted right to self-determinations”
-‘Che Guevara’
Scholars criticize and question the recent post colonial focus on national identity. What is seen in contemporary Middle Eastern studies is a pathological obsession with-identity and the problem of the lack of Middle Eastern identity formation is widespread, and that identity is an important aspect of understanding the politics of the contemporary Middle East.
The contestation of post colonialism is a contest of representation tends to imply that colonial imperial forces for from themselves having changed and changed the culture over which they are exercised have merely transmuted from the physical world into that of the intellect, with the facet implication that colonization today is less a physical act than an intellectual me. Imperialism, colonization, and resistance to the colonial-imperial process be this ideological, discursive, military, economic or hegemonic remain a contemporary political fact or situation. The difference is that it takes place in a different world from that of a hundred years ago and its forms and kinds too have changed.
The first stage of a process of describing Empire is to analyze where and how our view of things is inflected by colonialism and its constituent elements of racism, over-categorization, and deferral to the center. The processes of history and European historicizing continue to warrant attention, but they should not seduce us into believing that describing empire is a project simply of historical recuperation. The hegemony of Europe did not end with the raising of hundred national flags. This is especially concerned with the power that resides in textuality.
While, this is not the place to attempt to critique the overall aims of Post-Colonial studies, it is the intension here to take odds with the notion of ‘describing’ Empire and to coin in its place the concept of re-inscription as a starting point to comment on a few of the concerns of Post-Colonial discourse. At the same time it is here to make the general suggestion that much of what has been perceived of as Post-Colonial both in its oppositional and complicit forms is perhaps better understood as post-imperialism. The process in which an empowered culture assimilates destroys or estranges a powerless one. Colonialism differs from imperialism chiefly in the degree of subjugation of the native culture.
Description reinforces the idea of binary oppositions, and the process of cultural exposition after empire and politically engaged members of Western institutions of behalf the subaltern or ‘others’, reversing this process simultaneously describing empire. Perhaps we never have had again the topography of post –colonial discourse seldom seems this simple. Describing empire with its interesting focus on textuality. The texts of Empire need to be described as part of the anatomy of Empire’s, but they also need to be described as part of the liquidation of empires effects.3 If this implies the location of the discourse of post colonialism within the wider concerns of global culture after empire then however, the abstraction of the condition of post colonialism to the domain of ‘textuality’ is one thing with its own set of problems and considerations, and the evolving nature of that which is represented is another.
The essential problem with the notion of describing empire is that every act of description involves an acknowledgement of inscription, an acknowledgement and perpetuation of the re-writing of the binary of Empire and (post) colonial, of colonizer, and colonized that fuels the Post-Colonial concerns with marginality and recognition of the other. When viewed this way, de-scribing Empire is a view of Post-Colonial study in which the colonizer or settler-invader is forever on the back foot. This retro lectionary stance is at odds with the process of centripetal diffusion by which empire is fragmented and de-creates the energies by which hybridized identity is emergent.
 There is a danger that in ‘unraveling’ the imperial project, we will miss new and important threads that are refashioned from its off casts, “The heterogeneous fields of post –colonial studies’ is reproducing it at present as a spectacle of disorderly conduct”. These are undoubtedly both genuine and well founded, articulated as they are in an overall concern about the ways power in post –colonial institutional critique is wielded, how it is both positioned and put to use. One irony is that the particular concern of the post-colonies that is relationship between colonizers and colonized within political, economic, discursive and geographical territories can be appropriated, manipulated and refined for expedient ends, even within the territory made claim to by post–colonial discourse itself. The problem however articulated and at whatever level of abstraction is the familiar one of identity and it is a problem that quickly spreads from the local to the theoretical, from the particular to the general.
There is never a necessary politics to the study of political actions and reactions, but at the level of the local, and at level of material applications, post–colonialism must address the material exigencies of colonialism and neo colonialism, including the neo – colonialism of Western academic institutions themselves. 4
The issues of post–colonialism and texuality are complicated and perhaps ‘livened’, by the strong oral traditions of the ‘colonized’, coupled with increasingly multi-cultural populations. Which was exemplified in Shiva Naipaul’s Fireflies, Not only is there obvious language barriers between colonizers and colonized but also barriers of the medium of expression. Of course, colonialism and post–colonialism are directly concerned with this very process of interchange, assimilation, appropriation and re-appropriation and the political and theoretical ‘re-positions’ and ‘repositioning’ within this process. However, there is a danger of hypocrisy in post–colonial studies given that those who theorize and are involved in claiming voice for the post- colonial subject are themselves often settler subjects.
The very diversity of colonial experience with its Euro centered hierarchies has fathered a shadowy counter hierarchy in which he or she who can most plausibly claim the kiss of the whip is accorded eminent speaking position. Like the settler subject, a majority of postcolonial critics find themselves uncomfortably inside the residue of power structures they profess to oppose, and ambivalent beneficiaries of those structures.
The basic claim for post colonial studies that its ambiguous politics was implied in the field it brought into being; “commonwealth literature” did not include the literature of the centre, which acted as the impossible absent standard by which it should be judged. The term also occluded the crucial differences between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ commonwealth, between White settler colonies and black nations that typically had a very different and more difficult route into a different kind of independence”,5 post colonial studies attempted to consider and define relations between the settler or colonial invader races and groups and the first nation races and groups which articulated the newly emergent voices of nationhood after colonialism.
A novel which claims voice in opposition to the imperial process and which articulates a counter discursive stance to the presence of the settler invader would, on the surface, seem to offer itself to the term ‘Post-Colonial’. An example of such writing is ‘Shiva Naipaul’s Fireflies (1970) which narrates social & personal response to the gradual Westernization of a remote African city, Trinidad, Ostensibly from the position of the pre modern colonized. However, written in the language of the imperial colonizer and by an author living in contemporary cosmopolitan London, there is an implicit collusion in the conception and writing of the novel with the culture of imperialism.
In contrast, a novel of post –imperialism may make no overt reference to the relationship between settler invader and colonized peoples but nevertheless, read contrapuntally, implicates the imperial culture in a relationship with complex array of international identities in the post-imperial era.
Fundamentally, the imperialism idea comes from the early modernization concept that began with the 16th century. Afterwards Renaissance, catholic reformation and reconnaissance actions follow this concept in order. Then geographical explorations take place in history and in this sense a lightening period exists by the help of these agendas. This lightening period consists of many different ideologies. We see these ideologies changing and shaping time to time and one of these specific action oriented ideas is seen as imperialism with its impact on some African and Asian part, in particular, the response of conquered areas to the “West” in late 19th century and early 20th century. In order to express what the imperialism is, it can be said that imperialism is an ideology to make good society by being rooted in a particular economic system, capitalism and benefits a particular class, which Marxists call the bourgeoisie or ruling class one such example among contemporary novels is A.S. Byatt’s Possession, (1990), a post modern historical detective novel in which plot and characters while seminally English are never. The less played out against a backdrop of an artistic from coterminous with Victorian imperialism (Pre-Raphaelite poetry) and in which the narrative unfolding in the present highlights the concern for cultural identity with an American neo-imperialism. This kind of imperialism is willing to slaughter thousands of innocent civilians for cheap things. On other words, striving for a world free of Imperialism does not permit Imperialism to occur wherever it wants. Post-Colonial studies characteristically can be seen as enacting a neat reversal of colonialism, the battle for cultural dominance characterized by the imperial impulse continues to be played out within such discourse, albeit in changed from and in disparate ways.
In many ways the process of imperialism is disseminated from within what is often little realized about empire is that in the act of ostensibly colonizing its subject nations, these nations themselves, albeit unwittingly, colonized empire. Agency is not merely un-directional but is in fact, multivalent. A system of cultural territorialisation and capitalist eccentricity is deconstructed, disseminated, and fragmented under the burden of its own expansion. The act of colonial-imperialism changed empire irrevocably from moment of initial imperial impulse. Empire stood less for territorialisation than for the Anglo conception of that territorialisation. The lines of trade communication, and discourse linking great Britain to it’s colonies, while controlled and maintained by the agents of empire, simultaneously masked a plethora of alternative stories told and retold along the same lines and the stories of counter cultures proliferated among lines within, across, and underneath the direct and ‘official’ systems of communications, trade and exchange represented by the first.
For all the initiating force of the metropolitan components in economic and power relations, they produced such vastly different imperial effects in the deferent countries as to suggest that imperial wealth and power were generated substantially through the third set of linkages which ran from top to bottom of local political economics. In the last analysis imperialism gathered its forces from the local collaborative systems which translated European economic and power inputs into multiplied indigenous outputs. The character of local collaboration and resistance, the extent of national unification, decided the balance of inequalities and so the degree of imperialism involved.6
Lines of communication and exchange within contemporary world cultures are now fragmented, widened, interwoven, globally dispersed, and complexly intertwined. This has inevitable consequences for nation formation and even the way in which populations conceive the idea of home. As Vijay Mishra puts it. ’Home’ now signals a shift away from homogeneous nation states based on an ideology of assimilation to a much more fluid and complex definition of nations as a multiplicity of diasporas identities. 7
Post–colonialism, while ostensibly about the telling of these alternatives stories, in fact often ensures the parade of empire in cloths of the ‘other’. The term frequently connotes frustrating and all embracing binaries between ‘self’ and ‘other’ indigene and settler invader, the familiar and the stranger. So, the post–colonial becomes an uncontrollable Manichean tendency to divide all literature into that produced by the oppressors and that by the oppressed. The rubric is thus both to vaguely inclusive and too exclusive.
From Defor’s Robinson Crusoe (1715) onwards the allegories of colonial expansion often brought the colonial mind up against an image only on itself. As Hugh Ridley has observed in Images of Imperial Rule (1983): “Crusoe’s Island, like the fictional representations of European colonies which succeeded it, is peopled with figures which already lay within the traveler’s mind; the journey across the world, the shipwrecks and the strange adventures lead although the protagonist by no means realizes this back to Europe and the European self”8
Imperialism was never about the culture of colonized and not implicitly about contact between cultures. While economic terms imperialism was about profit, first and foremost it was about the imperialist psyche, the representation of the white European unto him or himself, be this reflected in the Rousseauean idea of the noble savage or in the Christian missionary project of bringing enlightenment to the indigenous ‘heathen’. However, from the perspective of the colonized that may have no culturally embedded pre-existing notions of contact with others (the colonizer or imperialist) prior to colonization, it could be argued that such a process is only recently being reciprocated in literatures written from the perspective of the colonized.
The attribution of a unified speaking voice and an authentic native ‘essence’ to the colonized, for from de-establishing imperialistic cultural practices, actually serves to reconstitute the subject of the West. The theory of pluralized subject effects gives an illusion of undermining subject sovereignty while providing a cover for this subject of knowledge. The much publicized critique of the sovereign subject thus actually inaugurates a subject.9
Positioning discourse from colonized people in to discrete and knowable categories such as Non-European or ‘Third-World’ acts so as to introduce the narratives of colonized peoples which are in turn interpolated by Western narratives of identity.
Similarly, Shiva Naipaul in Fireflies (1970) discusses the contemporary condition of societies in which it is increasingly difficult attach identity, meaning or ‘authenticity’ to a coherent culture or language or to a discourse which attempts to do so.10
The pattern of cross-cultural influence of today no longer involves the gradual absorption of non-modern cultures to modern; rather, the non-modern has almost equally powerful effect on the modern. We do not envisage the world as populated by endangered authenticities but rather as a globalism that harbor improvisatory and combinational cultural responses in which the third word plays itself against the first, and vice versa. If authenticity is rational then identities can no longer be stable and self other relationships are a matter of power, rhetoric, and discourse rather than cultural ‘essence’. The traditional’ culture’s are without regret (or the nostalgia-mode of post-modernism). They are newly sincerities as part of an inevitable ongoing process. This process is not that of modernization which is mono cultural but of global inter connectedness in the legacy of imperialism.
The fundamental distinction to be made throughout this debate is the understanding of post–colonialism as a means largely for the descendents of the settler groups in the colonial–imperial.
Process to claim authenticity and autonomy and purge the guilt of empire as a process which altered pre modern civilization. This is attempted by firstly separating themselves from the ‘original’ culture and secondly by increasing understanding their empire as a muted and ambiguous legacy among nations, ethnic groups and selves engaged in the culture of imperialism. Given this reading, post–colonial literature can be seen as a transitory phase of the under cultural condition of the legacy of imperialism.
Once the colonial imperial process is entered into, however, and over time a relationship between colonizer and colonized established Independence from the colonizer is questionable if one shares the same means of expression (or cultural codes and social masses) as the colonizer if not the same customs. The act of reclaiming indigently ‘damaged’ by the process of colonization prescribes indigently in changed terms. There is only a movement forwards, and this while no longer necessarily an overt British imperialism in the contemporary climate now proceeds in the negotiation of cultural identities within complex forms of neo imperialism and corresponding resistances to them such complexities characterize the expressions of cultures; after ‘empire’ often in hybrid terms but when these are reassembled under the overriding mantle of ‘post colonialism’ they often do so hypocritically.
Such is the reversal of psychological and literary theoretical reading in the wake of decolonizing projects and the process of ‘othering’ that not only is an apologetic guilt empire and the process of colonization the unwritten code of the post colonial critic but also the spurious belief that only the indigenous can claim an authenticity or an authentic cultural expression above, above beyond and prior to that of the colonizer and this ironically according to the measure of racial purity. Its such this is a form of post modern nostalgia mode in which only the simulaeruon of an essential past is invoked to allay the ambiguity and indeterminacy of the present.
The white racism at the ‘dark heart’ of empire variously impelled or tempered by the enlightenment and Christian projects of bringing ‘civilization to the savage’ is finally invested in an expression of post colonial descendants. Such a condition is co-incidental with the recognition of the ‘other’ the farmer colonized although ironically still within the cultural terms of the post – colonizer a guilt which constructs now the former colonizer ‘other’ or racially pure and culturally authentic. As  Masel puts it in Late Landings. Reflections on belatedness in Australian and Canadian Literatures. “The problem for post colonial writers is that the landscape has in effect been hierarchies and that collective post colonial guilt aside the places of authenticity are perceived to be debarred from post colonials of non aboriginal abstraction.11
Every claim to cultural dominance on behalf of the colonizer was also an assertion of cultural lack of the colonized. In the late twentieth century Western modernity has fused and interfused with pre-modern indignity and resulted in hybridist’s globalism the scattered Diaspora, and a complex web of mass communications that proliferate within late capitalist and post industrial post modernity. A parallel is also to be drawn between this process and the waning of Christian influence as the imperial project metamorphoses into the global shifts and divides of post modernity in which disparate fundamentalist religions challenge the spread of Christian belief as enshrined in the rhetoric empire. Mr. Lutchman celebrates the Christmas with very enthusiastically, especially the Khoja community, Trinidian Hindu community celebrates Christmas which served to emphasize their essential separateness and distinctness from each other. Which served to emphasize their essential separateness and distinctness from each other. Which was exemplified in the Shiva Naipaul’s Fireflies [post-I chapter six]
This awareness of lines between cultures is also in the light of the media and communication era of contemporary post modernism expressed not only in the sense of nationalist division fundamentalist beliefs arising in formerly colonized areas, but also in the sense of complex and multivalent connectivity. In some sense post modernism acts as a justifying discourse which by osmosis enables the incorporation of the settler culture into post colonialism as for example with Stephen Slemon’s analysis of the post colonial as anti colonial discourse, a counter – discursive form that emerges in what he calls ‘second world’ societies as the acquire a first world agenda internal reaction against the homogenizing tendency of imperialism example of such societies include Canada, the Caribbean, and in some senses New Zealand.
The inter-connectivity of discursive forms paradoxically works towards defining national boundaries as at the same time it dissolves them. As a consequence, aperies have opened up within and between cultures, national and international ‘post-cultural’ boundaries and it is in these largely undefined and in determinant areas that post imperial cultures negotiate their cultural identity. We can found this post-imperial culture throughout ‘Fireflies’ of Shiva Naipaul. The intermixing of races in some cases has resulted in newly and vigorously voiced nationalism; it is also expressed in laissez faire post modernism, increased and increasing links of transportation and information between nations and on the macro political and economic level the assembly of nations into three trading block European, Asian and American. The social, political and cultural anxieties and crises of nationhood have resulted in re-readings of privileged pure posts which excludes unwanted narratives, races, cultural references. Thus history is re-read and sometimes purged and new histories are created in the reading. What these histories, be they re-interpreted and re-constructed in the light of post colonialism cannot ignore however, is the overriding mantle of imperialism that brought them into being and the way it acts as a force for their ongoing change.
In this sense, we see the colonization action of the ‘West’ under the name of imperialism against the African and Asian part of the world in late 19th and early 20th century. In some countries we see the entire colonization and in some of them there was semi-colonization according to some reasons that related with their understanding of modernity and the way that then show their reactions. In general sense it can be implied that the reaction of Sub-Saharan Africa against the impact of “West imperialism” was more strict than the one in central Asia in terms of economic reasons, nationalism and religion.
To begin with the economic perspective of imperialism, imperialist countries need of raw material and market and the change in the meaning of imperialism seem to be the crucial point. Up to 17th century, imperialism was not related with capitalism because these times land power was important. However, in later period of time, especially in the late 19th century the spread of industrialization in the world had achieved the point where international competition for markets was becoming profoundly. After the third threshold of industrial revolution, the new imperialist political ideologies became the state politics of European countries. The industrialization also spread to South Africa, which was exemplified in Shiva Naipaul’s Fireflies, Black and White, North of South etc. In this sense colonization action of “West” powers take place. As a provision, we see the strict but at the same time invalid of strict reaction of Africans in the Asian side; we do not see such kind of reaction has it seen in Africa. This is because of their preparations against the probable imperialistic action of “West”, that can be regarded as the extension of rapid modernization of “West”. Especially European countries could not entirely colonized South Central Asian countries such as Iran and India. For example England could not fight with India; because India was not so weak in terms of economy and because of its economical interdependence, India’s military modernization had been taken place in order to fight with any power. However the situation in Sub-Saharan Africa was not pleasing.
Even Shiva Naipaul asks which imperialist haven he was heading. Here ‘he’ refers to lion Jones, who ambushed congressman Leo Rayan’s delegation. The UK? The USA? Canada? A Guyanese businessman with whom author had chatted in Paramaribo had told him of the long queues that formed each day outside the British, American and Canadian embassies. Students, doctors, nurses, teachers, technicians and whores they were all trying to run away. These sentences are taken from the Shiva Naipaul’s ‘The Black and White’ (1980) [chapter-I, page no-5] which shows the views of Shiva Naipaul towards imperialism.
They were still living as tribal societies and they were ready to be treated as slave. First of all by the investigations of the European missionaries “West” were aware of the raw material sources that were not used such as cool and diamond. By the power in their hand, “West” took the region under control and made the people work for their benefit. They also made African pay taxes. Actually that led revolt against foreign occupation. Africans tried to kill the tax collectors as time goes by. For example in 1902 a tax collection exercise in Bailunde in the center of what is now Angola, went badly wrong when local people rebelled violently, attacking tax collectors and traders. (Both European and African). This was the first time that Africans had rebelled against the Portuguese in Angola (BBC WORLD SERVICE).
Shiva Naipaul’s fiction and non-fiction were characterized by a starkly pessimistic view of commonwealth societies which attacked the post-imperial native hierarchies for their crassness and mimicry of the West, and in turn the banality and diffidence of Western liberalism.

Shiva Naipaul:

Shiva Naipaul was born on 25 February 1945 in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, was a Trinidian and British novelist and journalist and also travelogue writer. The vocation of writing set him on the road to independence from his famous brother and a Nobel laureate. Vidhyadhar Surajprasad Naipaul (1932 to 1985) when he regarded as his exemplar. Shiva Naipaul was younger brother of V. S. Naipaul. He went first to Queen’s Royal College in Trinidad, the emigrated to Britain, having won a scholarship to study Chinese at University College, Oxford, London. At Oxford he met and later married Jenny Stuart in 1967 with whom he had a son, Tarun.12
While it can be argued that some of his work is directive, With Jenny’s support, Shiva Naipaul wrote his first novel, Fireflies, (1970) set in Trinidad, his birth place, which is a massive chronicle in two parts of the fortunes (good and bad) of Vimala Lutchman and followed it with The Chip Chip Gatherers, which is an excellent story of a group of characters in a Trinidad community is ruled by a tyrannical eccentric named Egbert Ramsaran, a man who is incapable of love and whose greatest pleasure is to control the lives of others. He then decided to concentrate on journalism, which is sometimes too caustic and can did for some commentators.
Terms like “liberation”, “revolution” In the 1970s he got wondering what terms like ‘liberation, and revolution and socialism’ actually meant to black Africans, and wanted to find out, first hand. His idea was to travel in East Africa for five or six months and visit Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia. If his experiences were interesting enough, he would then write a book about them, but it wouldn’t be a “straightforward travel book”, or a “current affairs” book. For example ‘Black and White’ (1980) of Shiva Naipaul, which is a comprehensive analysis of the 1978 Jonestown disaster in Guyana. He would instead, focus on the rhetoric of liberation and its actual manifestation and to do this, he would have to experience the “heat and dust” of the aforementioned countries.
Shiva Naipaul wrote to his English publisher with an outline of his plans, and received a go ahead. His book, North of South, was first published in Great Britain in 1978. He apparently had no original intention on doing a put down on blacks, but after his journey commenced, his experiences with Negro ineptitude and savagery were eye-opening; also he witnessed the sad devolution of the whites living under black rule so, his book turned into pretty much of a put down after all.
Naipaul got a ticket in Brussels on Congolese national airline. Anxiety must have shown upon his face, because the travel agent told him they had good planes – Upon landing in Kenya his luggage did not come off the plane. He was told that he might as well forget all about it, but he filled out a claim form anyway. A week later the luggage did turn up.
In Kenya, he found out that in the “New Africa”, the old form of tribalism, which had offered at least some slight constraint to greed was fading away and a type of society was forming which lacked definition and solidity. The new African society is being disfigured by lust and greed. Naipaul discussed this with a Dutch fertilizer expert and his wife Jenny Stuart.
In Nairobi the beggars have their own dearly demarcated territories, but when they get too numerous, they are apparently sounded up an taken off somewhere, away from sensitive tourist eyes and may be “called”, as are the numerous prostitutes.
To see how European formers were now doing under black rule, Naipaul traveled out to meet the palmers who had about three hundred acres planted to tea. They used black labour, and said the natives had rather work for them than their own people, who often treated them like slaves; not paying them properly, offering them no medical facilities, and housing them in deplorable conditions. This shows the post imperialism on South African countries.
But the Negroes were prone to filter and the palmers had to keep everything under lock and key. Their hands would even steal things they couldn’t possibly have any use for. And the palmers especially tried to keep liquor out of their hands. There was, they said, an old saying among the Europeans in Kenya that to give a native alcohol was like putting a loaded gun into the hands of a child. The palmer’s place was well kept, but across the way was a formerly white owned form that had been taken over and divided up among blacks.
One notable adventure that happened to Shiva Naipaul in the Highland country was a long, overland taxi trop. Having experienced enough African “Service Industries” by this time to be leery of them, he was nevertheless assured that his taxi for this trip would be the best because it had been ordered by the D.C himself, and Naipaul would be treated like a king.
In an ancient Peugeot Station wagon more people kept boarding one of them a girl with a baby, and there was also live poultry, pumpkins, and bags of grain. Arriving in Tanzania, the same mishmash of general incompetence was found. American women who had lived in up state New York was complaining abut the general indolence of the locals who did service work.
Under Negro rule in Africa, more land is turning into desert. Naipaul described on such area, he traveled through inhabited by the Masai. Unable to get into the last country he planned to visit Zambia by train, plane or bus, Naipaul managed to hitch a ride with party of campus who were headed for South Africa. He would ride with them as for as Lusaka, in Zambia. The first night in pitched their tents below on embankment of a railroad built by the clines.
It is obvious that Shiva Naipaul left the Dark Continent with a low opinion of black Africans, nor did he think much of the guilt-ridden whites, so full of self abasement, who chose to live among them as equals with the object of “uplifting” them. Just before doing his book, he took, a parting shot, or did a summing up, of the new black Africa. “Only lies flourished here. Africa was swaddled in lies---- the lies of an aborted European civilization, the lies of liberation. Nothing but lies.” Which is presented in his three controversial but altogether fascinating travel books.13
North of south (1978) the story of his remarkable journey through Africa, as Africa liberated from imperialism, he traveled through East Africa looking for answers to one question, “How wide is the gap between the rhetoric of liberation and its day to day manifestations? The question may sound wonkish, but Naipaul’s answers and his gust for them recounted in this book.
Shiva Naipaul’s best work, such as “Black and White”(1980) a comprehensive and superb analysis of the 1978 Jonestown disaster in Guyana is a model of evocative and build writing fed by an uncompromising and penetrating intelligence.
His numerous newspaper and magazine articles fear his own pungent signature and are persuade evidence that he succeeded for the most part in establishing a separate and distinctive voice.
Before securing to the novel form in the 1980’s with, Love and Death in Hot country (1983), a departure from his two earlier comic novels set in Trinidad, as well as a collection of fiction and non-fiction excellent short story, Beyond the Dragon’s Mouth Stories and pieces which contains eight short stories and eighteen pieces from the countries like England, India, Africa and also from religion and Islands etc.14
Shiva wrote three fictions and two non fictions ‘Fireflies’, The Chip Chip Gatherers, ‘Love and Death in A Hot Country’ there are fictions and ‘North of South’, and ‘Black and white’ is non fictions. Both his fiction and non fictions were characterized by a starkly pessimistic view of commonwealth societies which opposed mimicry of the West.
Shiva Naipaul’s premature death on the morning of 13 August 1985, at the age of forty from heart attack a while working at his desk, which event was a tragic loss for West-Indian and contemporary letters. 15 The spectator Magazine, for whom his wife Jenny Stuart had worked for as a secretary, as well as having published many of his articles established the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize, although it has now been discontinued.16
Paul Theroux described Shiva as a ‘Sot’ Shruken by the towering figure of his famous brother V.S. Naipaul, who had a penchant for drunken partying and needed his meals made for him. Theroux also took issue with Shiva Naipaul’s skills as a writer particularly as travel writer in his book Sir Vidia’s Shadow the memoir of Shiva’s older brother V. S. Naipaul has come under attack for its demonstrable inaccuracies.17
The great journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft appreciates radically Shiva Naipaul in The Spectator for his brilliant and provocative observation. Which also backed up by the novelist ‘Martin Amis,’ who wrote that “Shiva Naipaul was one of those people who caused your heart of lift when he entered the room. in losing him, we have lost thirty years of untranscribed, unvarnished genius, 18 David Holloway in the Daily Telegraph wrote, when Shiva Naipaul was dead, “We have lost one of the most talented and wide ranging writers of his generation.
Any serious critical treatment of Shiva Naipaul must began with the concession that his work bears some resemblance to that of his better known older bother have written satirical stories and novels about the ‘denuded’ (Unfinished journey), here after, (U.J. p29) Indian community in Trinidad both have expressed skeptical, or even negative, views on developments in Post-Colonial societies and both have exercised “the complementary arts of fiction and journalism.” (U.J. p29) His mothers large extended family {prototype for Khojas in Fireflies). Still loomed in the background, she was immediate family consisted of only his mother and his elder sisters. Moreover growing up in the 1950 Shiva witnessed many changes on the island long after. Shiva’s fiction is frequently mitigated – if not altogether cast aside by a sympathetic communion with perspectives and problems of character. His tone, especially in depicting the peoples of Trinidad is more upon elegiac than acerbic. Shiva is much quicker to celebrate many small victories of the human spirit. He is also for more comfortable dealing with human sensibilities. Indeed, the protagonist of his first and third novels and the most compelling character in his second novel, or all women. And finally his fictional Trinidad somewhat more densely populated with significant characters.
In four collections of essays Shiva Naipaul reflects not only on his own experiences and background but also on the situations of various emigrates, exiles and displaced persons, he has encountered. He writes movingly about India and West Indies, but he is perhaps most eloquently on the relatively infrequent occasions. When returns to the subject of Indian in the West Indies. Particularly the long difficult effort of the Indian community in Trinidad to maintain it cultural cohesiveness from generation to generation. Naipaul seeking after himself, identity, his place. And although he claims that he had no desire either to fabricate new ‘roots’ or rediscover old ones and he admits that he finds himself like many West Indies of various races. So, caught between two worlds, “like a fish of water” at both “It Hindu rite” and a ‘drive in cinema’ that his sense of self definition, ‘has its roots in nothing other than personal exgnes’ (Beyond the Dragons Mouth) p.42) Shiva’s writing has been attempt to fill the void, to replace the nothing of personal exigency with something more substantial. It is no accident that the titles or subtitles of three of his books contain the world “journey”. This journey tragically unfinished is in fact the generative source for his all fiction, especially for two the novels on which is reputation must rest, ‘Fireflies’ and the Chip Chip Gatherers.
The East Indians of Naipaul’s Trinidad is people in cultural decline. The community Naipaul was born had always stood somewhat apart from the predominantly Afro-European Creole culture of Trinidad. And rest of the Anglophone Caribbean. Brought to the region in 19th and early 20th centuries to work in cane fields. The Indians both the majority Hindus and the majority Muslims clung to the soil long after the terms of their indenture had expired only after very gradually as memories of India receded into the mists of time, did they begin speaking English in home, moving to the towns taking up trades, and in some cases “turning christen”. In Shiva Naipaul’s novels we can seen as components of the signal multi-faceted theme having largely to do with change. Change occurs in the stories most often for better or, worse as result of contact with metropolitan cultures of Britain and U.S.A social and economic changes resulting from fundamental alteration of traditional ways.
Two or three examples will make these patterns clear and serve as an introduction to the much grander variable of Fireflies. Thus Shiva Naipaul won the Jack Campbell New Statesman award, for his outstanding novel ‘Fireflies’ and also he won the John Llewellyn Rhys memorial prize and the Winifred Holtby prize and etc. In the year 1985, brightening star of West-Indies fell down. 

REFERENCE :
1.         Tiffin, C. and Lawson, A., (Eds), ‘Introduction’, De-scribing Empire ¾ Post-colonialism and Textuality (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 232
2.         Tiffin and Lawson, p. 9
3.         Tiffin and Lawson, p. 231
4.         Slemon, S., ‘The Scramble for Post-colonialism’, in Tiffin and Lawson (eds), Describing Empire, P. 32
5.         Mishra, V. and Hodge, B., ‘What is Post(-)Colonialism?’ in Frow, J. and Morris, M. (Eds.), Australian Cultural Studies Reader (St. Leonards, New South Wales: Allen & Unwin, 1993), p. 30
6.         Robinson, R., ‘The Excentric Idea of Imperialism, with or Without Empire,’ In Mommsen, J. and Osterhammel, J., (Eds), Imperialism and After Continuities and Discontinuities (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986), p. 282.
7.         Mishra, V., ‘Postcolonial Differ end: Diasporic Narratives of Salman Rushdie’, Ariel, 26,3,1995, p. 7.
8.         Ridley, H., ‘Images of Imperial Rule,’ (London: Croom Helm, 1983), p. 5.
9.         Spivak, G., ‘Can the Subaltern speak?’, in Williams, P. and Chrisman, L., (eds), Colonial Discourse and Post –Colonial Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 66.
10.     Clifford,J., ‘The Predicament of Culture,’ (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988).  The discussion here is in general terms.
11.     Masel, C., ‘Late Landings: Reflections on Belatedness in Australian and Canadian Literatures’, in White, J., (Eds), Recasting the world: Writing after Colonialism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), Pp. 162-163.
12.     Shiva Naipaul, ‘Sardonic Genius,’ Geofrey Wheatcroft http://www. spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/features/14024/sardonic-genius.thtml
13.     Allan Callahan Shiva Naipaul’s African Journey
14.     Shiva Naipaul, ‘Sardonic Genius,’ Geoffrey Wheatcroft http://www. spectaror.co.uk/the-magazine/features/14024/sardonic-genius.thtml
15.     Sardonic Genius / The Spectator
16.     The Visit / The Spectator
17.     Patrick French’s, ‘Biography of VS Naipaul’s,’ Friendship with Paul Theroux – Telegraph.
18.     Martin Amis, ‘New Statesman,’ April 1973 Black and White by Shiva Naipaul as reprinted in The War against Cliché, see also http://www. scribd.com/doc/971098/Martin-Amis-The-War-Against-Cliche-Essays-Reviews-vl-0


                                                   CHAPTER-II
FIREFLIES- SHIVA NAIPAUL
            ‘Fireflies’ may be only one of many fictional portrayals of the East Indian subculture in Trinidad, but it’s clarity of conception and richness of detail has hardly been surpassed. The novels scope is also impressive, sparing nearly thirty years in the history of a large Hindu family, it touches on many aspects of life in Trinidad ethnic society during the middle decades of twentieth century. The powerful main spring of the plot is the struggle of ‘Baby’ Lutchman to hold together her immediate family – her husband Ram Lutchman, her two sons Bhaskar and Romesh- and gainer for herself a major of dignity and respect. Inseparable from the Lutcman’s story is that of the Khojas-Baby’s prosperous relatives-whose show decline mirrors the decline of the whole Indian community as a culturally distinct entity. The family chronicle from a ‘Fireflies’ like that of the Chip Chip Gatherers is very close what Wilson Harris calls “a coherent design on social evolution” that is peculiar to a particular social landscape”. Specifically Harris deposes the projection of “a ‘coherency’ based on the English social model “on” a native world”. Although Harris evidently finds this type of novel suitable only to the landscape of Europe, it is in fact an appropriate mode of self-expression for any complex highly satisfied, society-including that of the Indians in Trinidad. And when the society being defeated is itself in the process of gradual disintegration, the tension between this formal ‘coherency’ and the increasing incoherency of the “native world”, can yield remarkable effects.
            Much has been made of the need for Caribbean literature to develop forms that reflect communal or collective expenses of regain forms inspired by what Edward Glissant calls cross culture or multi- culture poetics. Harris explain in an interview with Kalu Ogbaa that by “community” he means “a kind of imaginative truth making it possible to see all cultures as partial insufficient unto –themselves ‘parts of a greater’. The problem with Shiva Naipaul’s portrayal of Trinidad Hindu word that he sees it’s transformation in two ways. He is saddened by its loss of culture particularity, but he also understands, somewhat remotely, that the less individualized, less centered Creole world is the “great whole” that is coming into being. These is no denying that Naipaul’s two long novels are chronicles of a society losing its center in the process of absorption into something else, something larger but more amorphous.1 But the very design of those novels looks to the decentered, cross culture Caribbean of the future. Unlike a house for Mr. Biswas, their titles don’t refer to the center tri petal point of single dominating characters. Indeed, these plots carry on long after their ostensible protagonist have died, suggesting that Shiva Naipaul in a very delicate, his own way-may have been deliberately and finds so in appropriable a medium for rendering Caribbean reality.
            And in writing this kind of novel, which begin coherently but yours opens like dragons mouth before the end. Shiva Naipaul exposes centerlessness in human life that extends frighteningly beyond the merely cultural.
            Naipaul establishes from the beginning of the novel that Lutchman’s story will be played out against the backdrop of a culture in edipse. Ram Lutchman’s presents consider it a ‘coup’ that the Khoja’s, the acknowledged leaders of the Hindu community in Trinidad. They owned several thousand areas of land, an impressive array of jewelers and two big houses, one in Port-of-Spain, the other in the country, and The Khojas were vigilant in defense of their traditions. They had long regarded themselves as the natural leaders of the Hindu community. Ram’s parents are willing to let even a poor relation like Baby marry to their son. The girl he was to marry did not inspire him. Baby was five years younger than Ram, dark-skinned, with large black eyes and oiled hair falling in plaits down the length of her back. Her nose was the best part of her when the time of marriage when Ram drove buses for the central Trinidad Bus company, whose chief depot and headquarters was in Doom Town. For him, the union provides “an opportunity-to raise his head above the anonymities of Doom Town, an anonymity that had brought the Lutchman’s to verge of sowal extinction”. Ram had been working has a driver in Trinidad. He had left school at sixteen, an education that had lasted longer than that of any of his contemporaries. Doom Town, the scene of these adventures, was in fact neither town nor village. It was sufficiently close to these of Khojas native place Port-of-Spain to make its status ambiguous. Doom Town was the catchments area for several villagers spread around it”. This fear of obliteration or nothingness lurking just beyond the delicate luminous structures of human just beyond the delicate luminous structure of human society permits the novel, giving even the comic scenes and edge of anxiety, it is the fear of the dark night into which the flashes of Fireflies always finally disappear. As for Baby, at this early stage in her life, “The greatness of Khojas” (P. 8) is the center of her being she lives to obey.
            The Khojas are great, however only “by default”, they renowned not for their achievements, but for their deliberate backwardness and their eccentrically” (P.10). In the face of desertion they continued to pride they on their orthodoxy, their dubious Brahmin forebears and the store of religious lose that had gained asylum in their bosoms. There was not a single doctor or lawyer amongst them, for the Khojas, having remained oblivious of the professions, regarded any such ambitions as heresy, and were content to contemplate and gloat over the thousands of areas of badly cultivated land owned by Khojas.
            There was some justification for this quite apart from their wealth, since there were other Indian families just as rich, if not richer. But in the eyes of Khojas, they had abdicated, lapsed into betrayal of the faith. “Many of them had been converted to Christianity” it means many of the other wealthy Hindu families have “gone into the professions, becoming doctors and lawyers- marrying English wives, living in lavish houses in the city and speaking only English” (P10)
            The Khojas however have on to their land kept there houses in the country and above all maintain the strict observance of all Hindu rituals and practices. Basically the elder Mr. Khoja had emigrated from India, who was almost mythical figure. For them religiosity and wealth were inextricably intercoined. “Everyone could grasp it. One should eat with once hand and not use knives and forks; one should say “Pranam” instead of ‘good morning’ or ‘good bye’; one should not eat beef or pork ; children should beaten regularly and brutally”(P.11).
            The Khojas “greatness” begins to falter when the matriarch of the family becomes feeble. Govind Khoja had been married to well known jeweler’s daughter Sumintra. This marriage from the elder Mrs. Khojas point of view, had two inestimable advantages, these were, the jeweler was rich and he did all her work free, when Sumintra had proved incapable of bearing like children, “Mrs. Khoja took her daughter in law to see the family Pandit” (P.21) and at the time of annual cattha, elder Khoja had been given separate room, and everyone of the family should be say pranam to elder Mrs. Khoja and later dies. For years it has been her task to deserve family unity as a bulwark against the enemies of orthodoxy. During her life time the family provides especially for Baby “an emotional coherence and consistency” (P.58). Baby is not crushed by her husband Ram Lutchman frequent beatings and infidelities early in their marriage. Ram Lutchman was away from the house for long periods. Some times, he was not at home for several days on end. If Mrs. Lutchman suffers she did so in silence. She accepted her situation with an heroic resolution, visiting her relatives in town and country, clearing the house and taking care of the children. When she thought of the other women, he experienced neither bitterness nor jewelry, but found she could contemplate the image drawn in her mind with something approaching indifference. And the performance of duty was not affected by betrayal. Betrayal could apply only if there had been love and affection and their marriage, so far, had been devoid of either of these. As it never occurred to her before not to marry Ram, so now it occurred to her that she might leave her husband. To do that would have been to imply that she had sought something positive from her marriage. That belonged to another set of ideas quite alien to the Khojas. Thus her husband’s infidelities could not destroy her.
            Yet as time passed, she was increasingly sad. Mrs. Lutchman was not a thinker like rest of the Khojas she was constitutionally incapable of thought. She only feel suspect, divine. She demanded from life not the cold certainties of season, but an emotional coherence and consistency which had been provided by the Khojas. Thus to Ram Lutchman, Baby could be soullessly dutiful because “her soul lay elsewhere” (P58). But even before Mrs. Khojas death, sings of disunity begin to appear to “stresses and strains that were already at work flinging out from the center the insignificant family cells that taken together, had formed the might of the Khojas”. (P 58)
            After elder Mrs. Khoja dies functional divisions and bitter squabbles over money and property proliferate the Khojas gave more stress on getting property of elder Mrs. Khoja. Much of her authority had descended, inevitable, to her son Mr. Govind Khoja. Each of the sisters, including Mrs. Baby Lutchman, received five acres of land and some pieces of jewelry, although Indrani, in recognition of her services and devotion, was given double the amount of land together with the house in the country. Mr. Govind Khoja. Mrs. Lutchman herself was secretly surprised that she had been treated equally with the sisters, because her parents died when she was five years old and only Mrs. Khoja looked after her, so Baby Lutchman was not eager to get any property from what elder Mrs. Khoja left. Even Baby Lutchman expressed her opinion. She said that “if he (Govind) was a man he could give it all to Indrani (P. 150)
            House in ‘Fireflies’ function symbolically as concrete manifestations of familial and social integration since the elder Mrs. Khojas death her home in the country has inherited by her eccentric widowed daughter Indrani. She had not stirred from the house in the country. She attended neither weddings nor funerals, visited no one and went out her to discourage visits from, any of her relatives. She had let the house crumble about her. The woodwork had rotted away in many places, and when it rained heavily, the roof looked. Several of the windows on the upper floor had been broken and not repaired and the floor boards creaked and moved underfoot. “Neglect showed itself everywhere”. (P.  278). This house, where, Govind and his sister were born had long been spiritual cen-ceromonoal functions to Govind’s house in the would land, neighborhood Port-of-Spain results in a distinct diminution of authenticity, when Romesh, younger on of Baby Lutchman and son-in-law of Mr. Govind Khoja – a true product of urban melting pot and an avatar of the dark side of acculturation, breaks into to the partly demolishes that house (Even impeding the Khojas “inner sane teem”) that authenticity is further undermined. At this point it is quite clear that the public and private, seculars and sectarian can no linger be kept separate. The assault of Govinda’s house strongly suggests that traditional structures associated with the past are defenseless against the unpredictable, disruptive forces of the modern
            Shortly after this episode, Govind Khoja builds a new house ‘Tropic vale’, which was a new housing estate situated a few miles West of Port-of-Spain, near the sea. The land had been bought up by an enterprising firm of real estate agent and divided up into plots of an acre each. Where the rich, envious to build their own paradise, flocked by the score to buy the plots of land now going at exorbitant prices, and “built extensive shambling hooker with swimming-pools (322) as he had promised his wife, he build a large and old fashioned house. There were few concessions to modernity. It was a square, two-storied building surrounded by a high concrete fence. (342 to 343) that strike on looker as a hideous blot on the landscape and wrecked the unity of the environment. Mr. Khojas, however, had resisted all their efforts. ‘That wall was staying there’, he told them. ‘Weather it wrecks the unity of environment or not. There were few people in tropic vale who designed to talk to him.
            Govind Khoja, from his rural birth place to the house Port-of-Spain to this monsterity in Tropic-Vale Govinda only dimly aware of how he has strayed from the traditions purpose to depend. In the end, he is still trying to live the two words on the modern subdivisions among the economic powers and social artistries of the new the Trinidad yet also in “aggressively” (P 342) old fashioned house that is neighbors who don’t even speak to him, regard as an ugly excrescence. The result is foreordained, as Govind finds himself adrift, a stronger in a strange suburb, a man without vocation or purpose.
            The center of the Fireflies is Baby Lutchman, and much of the novel is narrated from her perspective. Fireflies is a massive chronicle, in two parts, of the fortunes (good and bad) of Baby Lutchman,2 ‘Baby’ was the family’s name for Mrs. Lutchman. Her real name was Vimala (P 23). She married Ram Lutchman at first she is the rather passive wife of an undistinguished bus driver of the central Trinidad bus company, as maintained in previous pages but being the great niece of the elder Mrs. Khoja, she is circumscribed of the Khojas, one of the wealthiest, most powerful, and most important families in the region. Baby is powerless in that family, in which all veneration is paid to Govind Khojas because he is the head of Khoja’s family, piously enshrined by his flock of quarrel some sister, and at the bottom of the hierarchy is the girl who becomes Mrs. Lutchman, who scraps a living by running road side as a wife she did the washing and cleaned and looked after the house. She used to go to Khojas house to celebrate the festivals and Christmas Mrs. Baby Lutchman treated her husband as she would have done an employer.
            In the fifth year of Baby’s marriage she gave birth to Bhasker, this suggested by Govind Khojas, Bhaskar had inherited all the facial features of her father. Mr. Lutchman treatment of his wife took a turn for the worse after Bhasker’s birth when Ram beats her that day she used to leave the house. She never complained one word to her family against Ram. Mrs. Lutchman came from a family imbued with the enter prudential spirit (P. 19) Mrs. Lutchman sell vegetables on the Eastern main Road but her husband disapproved, even though she made the journey to Port-of-Spain to see Govind Khojas, he used to give advice to people “some of us have to work with our hands and some of us have to work with our heads”, (P 24) this type of man he was. Baby asked some financial help from him. He agreed with her, she always was proud of her family not for their money but for her wise brother. She was skeptical, convinced about development of garden by her husband, she was patient and reasonable. But what you think I would have against the tree Ram?(P 124)
            Mrs. Lutchman did not intrude on her husbands gardening activities, though she was sufficiently proud of the roses and the butterfly orchid to boast about them to her family. She could not detect in her husbands bodily presence, the house and garden, Bhasker and Romesh, these had become the focus of her loyalties and also her husbands new occupations deserted echoes of his estrangement with Doreen. As Doreen proclaimed she was planning to write a book on Trinidad Indians, and she was an anthropologist. She met Ram at his of the ministry of education. Doreen was tall and thin, with fair, watery complex in that matched her large, watery eyes and a sharp, wedge shaped nose. She was bony, angular, awkwardly put together women. She lived alone in the house which she had inherited from her mother. With her Mr. Ram Lutchman wondered here and these to help her for write a book on the Khojas. A about these developments Baby Lutchman knew next to nothing and could only guess at. She saw the underlying placidity he had gained from surrender, so that what had emerged from the suture was negative, the ending, pure and simple of an affair, but heralded, the emergence of some-thing new in him, but Baby Lutchman didn’t like this act of her husband.
            Unlike V. S. Naipaul’s family chronicle, ‘A House for Mr. Biswas’, this essentially, a woman’s story, a fact that does not become completely evident until the second half of the book.3 In part I, while Ram Lutchman is still alive, Baby is over shadowed by him this deliberate artistic strategy, a way of reflecting usual relationship between husband and wife in that society, Ram dominates part I because Naipaul makes as see the marriage as the society sees it with Baby in a subservient position. She is, moreover, alternately billeted and underestimated by male characters like her husband, Ram, her sons Bhaskar and Romesh who was younger son, and Govind Khoja thought the novel. “Listen, women, because I don’t want to have to say this again. From now on you are going to do what I tell you to do, when I tell you to do you hear! None of this blasted nonsense any more. You are going to do as I say (P. 15) Ram Lutchman was suspicious man and when he was drunk, always he used to beat her and quarrel with her. “If I am not careful you won’t have any clean shirt to wear to the office (P.56) Then he slapped her and asked a soap to wash his cloths and her elder son Bhaskar also underestimated Baby Lutchman. He didn’t listen any word while she wanted to marry Sonya and in front of her he used to smoke lot of cigarettes.
            Romesh younger son at his childhood also he never listen her he was damned, boy after the death of his father, he used to drink and underestimated his mother with Renouka. Mrs. Lutchman asked him, is Renouka putting all them ideas in your head, son? (P. 299) because he always hates Mr. Khoja but he replied that, ‘Don’t exert yourself about who putting ideas in my’ head, ma (P.299) Romesh was sent to jail for six months for quarrel with Mr. Khoja when released from prison, he did not return to home even with telling to his mother he migrated to New York.
            Govind said that, “Giving advice is an expensive business these days (P.25) which shows that how he underestimates Baby Lutchman. Which was happened when she asked some financial help from him. “You always wanting to run a business, be a market woman. After death of Mr. Ram Lutchman when Baby dream about her son Bhaskar will become doctor, but he mocked her, this only dream, this will not come to true. If he would be a doctor he has to study medical. Thus Govind Khoja underestimated Baby Lutchman.
            But after Ram’s death at the end of part – I, Baby Lutchman comes into her own demonstrating to the reader if not to her relatives, the gradual but inexorable disintegration of the clan had for a long time highlighted in Mrs. Lutchman’s mind the necessity for independence, her idea of independence had little in common with that of the majority of the sisters. Mrs. Lutchman helped Urmila, who is daughter of elder Mrs. Khoja in the shop and Bhaskar left the school and found himself a job (P.224) in thus way she alone leads, the family that she has been the families source of strength and move hidden protagonist all along.
            Ram Lutchman is Govind Khoja’s opposite – Ram doesn’t give permission to his wife to meet Govind. Govind ordered Mr. Lutchman for don’t forget to ask him for coffin and when Govind asked about provision business but Ram replied that he must ask Baby about that. Mr. Lutchman mourned for a week when his father was died, that time Khoja, said, ‘you taking it too hard. Ram, but Ram replied to him, “A man only have one father in this world you know. He was a great man in his own way; my father (P.30) after the death of elder Mrs. Khoja all property belongs to her was distributed among her children. In this Indrani get some property, but she served a lot and looked after her mother rather than others that are why Mr. Lutchman hates Govind for taking more property than Indrani, “If he was a man he would give it all to Indrani. Which show that how Ram Lutchman is Govind Khoja’s opposite?
            Govind Khoja a man who becomes part of the larger society out of economic necessity. One of countless Indians of his generation. Govind Khoja meditated not solely on abstract philosophic principles, but also on those endless fields of sickly sugar cane waving in the wind. The office of patriarch suited Mr. Khoja well he was a tall good looking powerfully built man. From childhood he had been accustomed to presence the respect and adulation of his sisters and some people were in fear about Mr. Khoja which was shown in the words of old man when Doreen and Ram Lutchman went to drive. The old man said about Khojas. “They own all the land around here. “Mr. Khoja does come here himself every month or so to look around sharp as a razor that man. Sharp as a razor (P.100). At the time of Christmas he accepted without complaint the Christmas cards and presents he received from his sisters, although he gave them nothing in return. “Hindus should only celebrate the Hindu festivals. I don’t want people to think me stingy. If someone decides to send me a gift for Divali, I will send them one too. But for Christmas? No Sir! (P.155)
            Govind was unproclaiming head of the Khojas family. He distributed some property among her sisters; rest of the property remained with him only. And he always used to attend the wedding ceremonies and he kissed the bride as a father as he described ‘the Khojas were a phalanx of solid respectability exclusive and superior to all around them.’ (P.201)
            One of the countless Indians of his generation cast by circumstance from the rural world of pandits and canfields into the polymorphous city. Govind Khoja was invariably present at the birth marriage or death of any member of the clan. He kept a record of the birthdays of all his nephews and niece who, between the ages of one and twenty first birthday they were given one dollar and fifty cents and struck of the list. At marriages he gave a water jugs and six glasses and when there was a death in the family he made arrangements with the undertakers and paid half the cost of the coffin. This last service was in constant demand. His linear, jagged journey out of the circular, enclosed world of the Khojas is as centrifugal as Renouka’s Who is Saraswatee’s only child, she a tall, thin girl, with plaits coming down to the small of her back. Her face though faintly scarred from chickenpox, bore traces of prettiness. She called her father ‘Daddy’ and she already at the sacred Heart convent which was one of the best fashionable girls school in Port-of-Spain, she were a distinctive grey and white uniform and showing legs for all the world to see (P.76) and only slightly more purposeful. He sees his marriage to the members of the Khoja family in practical terms as a means of achieving some kind of success of status in the wider, creolized society. Govind Khoja had been when still in his teens to Sumintra at the age of thirty Sumintra the daughter of a well known jeweler. This marriage from his family’s point of view had two inestimable advantages. The jeweler rich so suddenly Khojas get popularity among the society and jeweler did their work free of charge in this way Khojas see this marriage in practical terms.
            Mr. Ram Lutchman obtains with Govind’s help at the Government job, he meets people of other races and creeds which also shows his heartedness towards Govinda Khoja. For a time he conducts and affair with Doreen James as already quoted, she was a white woman, who affects anthropological interest in the Khojas and their culture. She got some help from Mr. Lutchman to write on Khojas. She got some following points about Khojas the Khojas don’t get married for love (P.44). Even she said to Ram, “Still you are under the thumb of that Khoja family as much as you ever were. Deep down you are afraid of what they will say”. (P.52)
            Ram Lutchman’s involvement with Doreen, as well as his somewhat stormy friendship with Wilkinson, a black colonel-worker at his office Ministry of Education. When Doreen ask help to write a book on Khojas she told that, ‘ she was anthropology’, After she had gone Mr. Lutchman turned to one of the clerks and said “You know what is anthropology is Wilkie?” (P.42) Wilkinson’s emblematic of his attempt to redefine himself as a Trinidian. Wilkinson told about Indians “I have always said to the boys that we Negroes just never learn to cook like you Indians and I’ll go on saying it”. (P.173). Even though the effort is more a series of improvisations that a carefully celebrated design. The conclusiveness of the project can be clearly seen not long before Ram’s death when he invites both Doreen and Wilkinson (no longer his mistress), to christens dinner at his house, near the end of the evening, Doreen playfully remarks “you are incorrigible, Ram” because he had given the books for rapping to Romesh, but he didn’t do that, so he warned Romesh ‘I am going to give you two weeks to read that book and if by that time you haven’t finished it. “I am going to skin you alive and Ram Lutchman’s response to Doreen’s remarks in rich in ambiguity and irony. Like many of the world she used to describe him, Mr. Ram Lutchman had no idea what it meant, still he was pleased existed that could describe him. It was a comforting thought. He laughed and replied call what you will (P.182).
            Call me what you will, Ram’s invitation of Doreen, “The European” at the table, to inscribe him as she sees fit reveals both how for he has moved from his Hindu roots and how for he has to go before he will be able to define himself in a society free from colonialist and neo-colonialist dispensations of power. He was much interested in celebrating Christmas and his eagerness to buy Christmas tree but he doesn’t show any interest in participation of Hindu festivals.
            Baby Lutchman’s life in the first half of the novel revolves around her husband and two young children. When early stages of their marriage she was very much fear about her husband and then she gave birth to two boys , Bhaskar and Romesh her life lies in looking after them especially at their studies in this way the first half of the books ends. When Ram buys a small house in Port-of-Spain, it is Baby who decorates it and makes it a home. The beatings that he inflicted on her earlier in their marriage end, but during affair with Doreen Ram spends a great deal of time, effort from his family. His wife has no choice but to look the other way and to seek solace in the emotional coherence (P.58) of the Khojas. If the time Ram breaks of the affair with Doreen and acknowledges to him how successfully he and Baby have welded (P.160) they lives together. For Baby this is the least anxious period she has known for the first time she begins to feel. Something for her husband ‘resembling affection’ (P. 125) as well as a measure of security’.
            After Ram dies, at the end of the part-I of the book ‘Fireflies’, however, one misfortune follows another. Mrs. Lutchman had taken in some lodgers and shown not only the feasibility but also the profitability of the undertaking. She had sold her five acres land (inherited by elder Mrs. Khoja) and with the money from this and the rent her lodgers paid, she was planning to expand her grocery. She worked out plans to divide the largest room in the house where she and her husband have slept into two and to redecorate it the grocery or its equivalent would come later. She sold her five acres, which she had left idle to the forming group of sisters, and set about preparing for the coming of the lodgers. Mrs. Baby Lutchman prided herself on her motherliness. “I am going to treat you as my own sons,’ (P. 229) she said towards the lodgers.
            Running a chicken farm was started named Esperanza, Bhaskar did his share of the work without complaint. Unfortunately, the ‘trouble’ with keeping chickens Mrs. Mackintosh began to drop hints about the smell and the flies. She had good reason to complain. But crop house and all chickens were died. In this way the running a chicken farm in the black yard ended.
            Mrs. Baby Lutchman worked in the Endeavour Infants School. She always had a tremendous interest in the education of children. She threw herself heart and soul into the affaire of the Endeavour Infants’ school. She left early in the morning, spending, the entire day away from the house and returning late in the evening when she would give Bhaskar a full report of the days events. She would get the minimal salary of ten dollars a week. After facing difficulties the never materialized, Doreen’s inefficient supervision, and etc. So, Mr. Khoja announced the closure of the Endeavour Infant’s school, so, she lost her job.
            Thus, all the efforts or various attempts of Baby Lutchman to earn living all fail in turn. Her children once her hope for stability continuity in an uncertain future, are no help. Romesh’s passion for the cinema knew virtually no limits. He would imitate film star. When he started smoking, Baby Lutchman suggest him not to smoke, he replied her ‘My health is my own business, I not asking you to live your life for my sake (P. 251). He left the school. Even he blamed lodgers to leave the house. After he starting of drinking, he got friendship with Renouka, then he stopped living at home. Renouka, a daughter of Saraswatte and Rudranath, and also was a niece of Mr. Khoja Romesh introduced her to the delights of the rum bottle. They are cousins when Mr. Khoja became candidate for people’s socialist movement partly in election. Romesh said that, that man not only lose the election, but that he lose his damn deposit as well. After the election Romesh went to Mr. Khojas house and beats him heavily, but Mr. Khoja reports it to police, which happened when, an increasingly widening all these abyss separates Baby from his son, arrested by them and spends six months in jail, when Romesh was released from prison he didn’t return home and finally migrated to New York, even saying good bye to his mother Baby Lutchman.
            His older brother, Bhaskar, goes to medical school in India but returns home after four years with no degree having suffered ‘a nervous breakdown. But the letter did not say what illness was peculiar kind they considered Mr. Lutchman to have was a conceit that only corrupt its victim. Therefore, her husband’s death was from their point of view salutary. It would open new vistas before his wife and initiate her into the practice of those higher, more realistic forms of selfishness of which they were the part masters. They were ready to welcome her with open arms charitable to the last including Govind Khoja. She refuses their offers to take her in having established individuality. The gradual but inexorable disintegration of the clan had for a long time highlighted in Mrs. Lutchman’s mind the necessity for independence. Her idea of independence had little in common with that of the majority of the sisters. It was not her own narrow, personal independence that she desired.
            She reluctant to become once more anonymous members of the clan selling the house is the most difficult decision she has to make because it has become, since her husband’s death. The house had become for Mrs. Lutchman the “most concrete symbol of her independence.” (P.226). For Ram that she has internalized and made part of her strength. No less than Govind, Baby caught.
            Naipaul’s fiction offers many of respective on the vacancies underlying human experience, but perhaps the most chilling is the nearly total absence of emotional connection between parents and children’s. This gulf erases a basic link between past, present, and future that can give life meaning. It is therefore more than just a sad sign of her own life’s emptiness that Baby repeatedly tells her lodgers all of them strangers I was like a mother to you. I used to treat you like my own sons, call me ma” (P. 384). In the end, with no means of support and a lazy, near ashonic son on her hands, Baby is forced to sell her house and move in with friend who live “in the heart of sugar cane country” (P. 391).
            Although, Baby, more than any other member of the family, maintains good relations with all Khoja factions. The sisters considered Mrs. Lutchman an unfortunate woman. They saw in her someone much weaker than themselves, who had allowed herself not only to the misused by her husband, but, worse still, had actually formed affection for him. They prided themselves on their knowledge of the world, their control of those bits of it that affected them, and their strength of will. “Affection of the between two worlds.” If she declines rejoin the old, rigid world of sectarian tradition, she finds it equally impressible to hold on to the life she dried to make for herself (represented in her mind house) in the new, fluid world of capricious change.
            Baby’s attempts to accumulate herself to the new world are remarkable in view of her life long fear of the kind of change that its dominant feature. Even before Ram’s deaths, she is “worried” whenever she can ‘discern no pattern in her behavior, no links between one obsession and another, and this sometimes worried her. (P. 139). The absence of pattern – weather conceived as chaos or the void – is the main source of individual and cultural anxiety in the novel. For that reason, the emotional instability of both Lutchman’s as well as the insanity of Renouka’s father, assumes great thematic significance. They are dramatic enactments of all the arbitrary terrors that seem to lie beyond the safe enclosures of the familiar. When Baby attends one of the annual cathar of family gatherings at Govind’s woodland house, it had of late assumed in her mind a significance which had never bothered to bestow on it before, or even realized had existed. She had come to regard it as an inevitable part of the year’s activities. Now, unaware that it had happened, she had isolated and invested it with an aura that hinted more of a recapturing of vanished joys and landscapes than a simple coming together of the family, she was going there to recreate something, to try to keep hold of all the strings that kept her world in motion and incise on her memory the colours, the smells, the features of faces, the discomforts all the elements that, taken together, had made an intelligible whole. For the first time she tired to avoid thinking about what was to come after it. She had become conscious that “the part was indeed past and that the present and future were going to be very different” (P.61).
            From this point on she begins think about ways of reading herself for a future which the bonds of the traditions will no longer hold. That they are already loosing his evident to her.
            The bonds were weakening and, as a result, the emotional coherence was beginning to suffer. The evidence was to hand. Why else would she be living in this house? Why else would the house in the country be out of bounds? Woodlands were not and could never be an adequate substitute. Mr. Khoja still wielded this spiritual authority unchallenged, but that could not last forever. Almost anything shatter the harmony when the time came. And then, what? That contingency had to be prepared for. It would demand qualities of another order, and she could not be certain whether she possessed them (P.59).
            One tactic, she adopts irrelevant on the fortune – telling skills of her eccentric next door neighbor – Mrs. Mackintosh, like, Mrs. Mackintosh, naturally, provided her with the information Bhaskar’s letters did not supply from India where he was studying medical. She assured Mrs. Baby Lutchman that he was the most brilliant student in her year and that his professors were extremely fond of him. The most frequent ‘sign’ in the fear-leaves was what Mrs. Mackintosh was fond of describing as ‘long, thin fingers.’ He is going to be a famous surgeon. That sign means he had delicate fingers. There can be no doubt about that. You can take my word for it.’
            Baby’s dogged belief in the prognosticating powers of this Charalaton is a revealing indicator of her need to cast some kind of a controlling pattern over a randomly unfolding future. But her major strategy is to develop a sense of self-reliance. “The gradual... inexorable disintegration of the clan had for a long time highlighted in Mrs. Lutchman’s mind the necessity of for independence” (P. 223). Baby Lutchman cherished her way of copying with the “senseless, nightmarish chaos” (BDM P. 114) that drives Clara mad in “The Dolly House.” Although she reminds genuinely loyal to the Khoja family, Baby realizes that their pattern, cynical world is fading and that she must know like her husband before her, into disorderly future.
            The final chapter of the fireflies leaves an impression like that of the silence following the last note of symphony, which filled with a incident. Much earlier in the novel just after death of Ram it has assured to Baby. The house had become for her the most concrete symbol of her independence. If that were to go she would have nothing left. She had identified herself completely with it, if she lost her house, “she would have nothing left” (P.226). Nothing is precisely what she does have left at the novels end, which finds her occupying a single room in another families house. Mrs. Lutchman exercised her ‘privilege’. She advertised the house and arranged for Bhaskar and herself to live with Gowra and her family in coalmine. No sooner had she divined Mrs. Lutchman’s plight following the failure of a chicken farm and the closure of the school than she went there. Mrs. Lutchman would look after Gowra’s small shop. Part of money from the sale of the house would be set aside for paying Bhaskar’s passage to England.
            Gowra Ramnath distant relative of Mrs. Lutchman. Gowra had liked Mrs. Lutchman because, from the very beginning, she had been attracted by her fine nose, like Mr. Lutchman in the days of his marriage. However she had relented and Sonya, a daughter of Gowra lived in the house with her child. Mr. Ramnath worked, like his neighbors, on the sugar estate, Mrs. Lutchman and Ramnath’s wife Gowra were about the same age, in their relations with each other Gowra had always assumed the role of senior partner. Gowra had invited them to live with her not because she needed any help in running the shop it was small and Sonya could have done that adequately,’ not because of any sympathy for Bhaskar’s misfortunes she was convinced that everything had sprang from some ineradicable flaw in his character; but simply because she was distressed by ‘Baby’s bad luck’ and aware of her love for commerce, felt that pretending to work in the shop would take her mind off her worries.
            But Bhaskar gradually came to knew Sonya better; she swept his room every morning and made the bed. After a while, perhaps as a result of their growing familiarity, she began bringing her child with her, a girl and Bhaskar, taking the child on his knee, would play unenthusiastically with her while Sonya cleaned the tided. Sonya, leaning the broom against her hip, would look at them and laugh. Sonya brought him a cup of tea at one morning. Bhaskar was surprised and embarrassed. He had never really talked to Sonya before this, but now left that her kindness obliged him to do so. Sonya disappointed by her husbands act. Bhaskar enquired Sonya everything. Softly, then they had become friends, and decided to marry each other, and Bhaskar migrated to England with Sonya and her child.
Fireflies concludes with marriage like many 19th century novels, a marriage, however that betokens not social integration but its opposite. Before Bhaskar’s Departure, Baby in a final gesture toward the fixity and assurance of a whole culture holds modest ‘Farwell Puja’ in his honor. A short time afterwards she accompanies Bhaskar and his bride to the docks, a journey “already so familiar to her,” (P. 416) from other departures. The Puja and the embarkation are emblematic of the two world of the novel – the novel ritual looking back to traditional ordered past; the other looking forwards to an uncertain, but certainly changing future. After these ceremonies are concluded, a vacancy settles over Baby Lutchman, she sits at her window in the Gowra’s house, gazes out over the canfield and for “longed now for nothing“ (P.416), because when Sonya gone, the full charge of the shop came to Mrs. Lutchman, she understood that it had come twenty years too late and also she lost her interest or taste for commerce.
The title of the novel ‘Fireflies’ carries within it a full measure of Naipaul’s ambivalence toward his subject. When the Lutchman first move to Port of Spain, Ram busy “a bowl shaped light shade for the sitting room in which scores of small insects where trapped and died“ (P.40) Entrapment and extinction ideas, along with the association with light carry over to an anecdote that Govind Khoja relates year later. A boy, he once knows he tells Bhaskar Lutchman, in “used to catch fireflies and put them in an old gum bottle..... And he would study like “when his wife asks “but didn’t the ‘fireflies’ die being locked up in a bottle like that?.” He replies that fireflies are not so easy to kill “they are some of the strongest insects of the islands” (P.247) Again; there is suggestion of entrapment and death but also of beauty laminations and strength. Perhaps most important it is the glow of the fireflies that enables the bay in the story to read illuminating the text that will prepare him for life in a world from which fireflies have vanished. Against this image of deny fix of colored light (P.99) appeasing, then disappearing in the black void, stands the novel itself. A coherent design, as Wilson Harris says, “but one based on social extinction rather than social evolution” yet design itself remains, an intricate radiant ideogram of a way of life that is slowly flickering out.
REFERENCES:
1.      Geoffrey Wheatcroft, ‘Shiva Naipaul: Sardonic Genius,’ Saturday 13th August 2005 an Article.
2.      Geoffrey Wheatcroft, ‘Shiva Naipaul: Sardonic Genius,’ Saturday 13th August 2005 an Article.
3.      Patrick French’s, ‘Biography of V.S. Naipaul,’ Naipaul’s friendship with Paul Theroux – Telegraph.

 
CHAPTER-III
JOURNEY TO NOWHERE – BLACK AND WHITE
Shiva Naipaul portrays the present condition of Guyana, Surinam, and U.S.A very elegantly. He traveled across the number of places like Jonestown, San –Francisco, California, and many others cities of the Guyana. Naipaul lays emphasis on political and social life of Guyana, and on the other hand he exposes the US intrusion in Guyanese politics. And Shiva Naipaul exposes especially what type of condition was there in his travelogue. He describes Guyana as a land of endemic scarcity (P.3). Just over nine hundred Americans in thrall to a faith healer espousing a mixture of socialism, racial brotherhood and cooperative agricultural enterprise these are stated ideals what Shiva Naipaul finds in the Government of Guyana which had died in a desolation of murder
The Government of Guyana sends a delegation in leadership of Leo Ryan to study the situation of Jonestown. On the road to Guyana Shiva Naipaul describes about Surinam, the former Dutch colony. Surinam was suffering from the aftermath that had swept over many of its potential citizens on the eve of independence, clinging to their still operative Dutch nationality.
World’s only Co-operative socialist republic country is Guyana. Now Shiva narrates the political aspects of Guyana, British Guyana was very different from Trinidad. The newsletter, however, only served to emphasize the backwardness, the poverty and the strangeness, Forbes Burnham, the Guyanese Prime minister, his political fortunes assiduously fomented by the CIA and the British colonial office was, waiting for the downfall of the Marxist Cheddi Jagan – a leader of the opposition party, independence eventually came in 1966. Guyana was being converted into a cooperative socialist republic. Burnham, governs Guyana today, he came from poor family, he had dreamt as mayor of Georgetown, chief justice, and the first prime minister of the West Indies. Later he succeeded in his life, as undisputed king, paramount chief of Guyana since 1964(P.17), he began to show symptoms of radicalism, to thrash around for the left using credential he so conspicuously lacked, because, his frantic search or hard to find. His unsavory political lineage had reckoned with the outsets and he is the leader of people’s National Congress. He was the only cause Guyanese bauxite and sugar under the control of American, Canadian and British interest. He set off for the 1970 conference of non- aligned nations being held in Lusaka, the Zambian capital, where he would make his international debut as a Third World–militant. He supports Africa for the freedom fighters and also he offered Guyana as a refuge to African freedom fighters and he embarked on a policy of extensive nationalization and he was a Marxist – Leninist. He was very eager to change constitution of Guyana. It’s very simple it gives us an opportunity to rewrite our constitution, which in our circumstances had become irrelevant”. (P.9), which designed to the Comrade Leader sweeping powers and control over the elections. Even Guyanese Government controlled press. Guyana did not have free press but later massacre at Jonestown the country had been invaded by world’s press. Guyana is a country the size of the kingdom, with a population of less than one million. Shiva compared his town Trinidad with Guyana.
Shiva’s views about educational system of Guyana, one day he visited a showpiece school modeled on a blue – print developed by the World Bank, which has large building, sixteen hundred pupils of secondary education age. That school offered both vocational and conventional academic training with residential facilities. Girls learning secretarial skills sat behind ranks of typewriters. He vividly explained, he said “Everywhere he looked shining new machines (P.14) even he exemplified Shakespeare for appreciating brain power of Guyanese people in handling machines. A proper technical education presupposed a sound academic foundation and he comment their poor performance in English language.1 Then he suddenly dropped to agriculture section. As teacher of that department explain each student has to be in change of his own little plot.
Forbes Burnham was comrade leader and his philosophy of cooperative socialism. The people’s army always supported him to introduce new schemes and wherever he visited has to take permission (P.20), which shows the strictness of Guyanese Government. The people’s army cannot perform its developmental role because it was buttressing the regime. The people’s police cannot do any hunting, farming and fishing because it is buttressing the regime. Even Forbes Burnham’s wife Viola, the president of the young socialist movement and the women’s Revolutionary Socialist Movement. Forbes openly exists to buttress the regime. There is the People’s militia with its motto “Every citizen a soldier” now; he made his People’s National Congress party as the major national institution after the former general secretary Eusi Kwayana. In the days before he came a Marxist – Leninist, he had been connected with the diamond business. The out side world, defying all reality, (he Guyana National service & Forbes Burnham had been praised by Tanzania, Zambia, India, Liberia, Venezuela, the German Democratic Republic, Sweden and Cuba and the equality for women is provided the right of a free education from nursery to university.2 There is a right to be looked after in old age – which reflects provisions of constitution for the people of Guyana.
Shiva Naipaul lays emphasis on the role of Pastor Jim Jones towards the Guyanese life, especially his institution People’s Temple. Jonestown is the jurisdiction of the People’s Temple at its very first days in Guyana. Temple promised sixty-five thousands new housing units by the end of 1976. Rev Jim Jones is the foremost spokesman for Christian socialism in the United States today. The depth of his character and his dedication to human kind are measured each and every day in the practical help he extends to all people, homes for homeless; food for the hungry; education for countless youth; medical, dental, and legal assistance for poor. The list goes on and on. In People’s Temple the most essential teachings of the early church are revived. Love of one’s brother and sister, equal justice and equal opportunity, and the sharing of one’s earthly possessions for the common benefit of all these are the elements of radical faith, which Rev Jones and his congregation have translated into actions. Their success has inspired and has challenged church and community leaders throughout California and the United States; Jones has consistently praised the progressive, humanitarian philosophy of the Government of the cooperative republic of Guyana.
The relationship between the Government of Guyana and the People’s Temple is exactly the same way it dealt with all other foreign organizations in the country. Minister Mingo, who is a vigilant and faithful watchdog of the states interest, Jonestown had been constantly visited by officers and senior official of the Guyanese Government. The comrade minister had many contacts with representatives of the People’s Temple: The residents of Jonestown could not have voted in Guyanese referendum because these are the citizens of America; American citizens had no voting rights in Guyana (P.27). The sylvan enclave Jones had made the headquarters of the People’s Temple, in 1965, together with about one hundred and of his most devoted disciples, Shiva reported, Kathy Hunter, she had written number of articles about the Temple and its good works and she was treated in a most insulting and contemptuous manner, she informed it to the Ministry of Home Affairs.
The Rayan delegation, the American congressman, accompanied by an anti–Temple group arrived at Jonestown in November 1978. Lane, a member of delegation, said that, ‘various agencies of the U.S Government had for a long time been oppressing the People’s Temple, which was religious organization. If some of its members had left the US and come to settle in Guyana that was only because they were denied their constitutional rights at home. The delegation appealed to the US Congress and Senate. It was a chameleonic performance, slithering elusively between patriotism, blackmail, threats and sentimentality. The concerned Relatives accused the latter recruiting mercenaries to invade Guyana and kidnap people living in the commune, which had been to alert the president, the state department and the Government of Guyana. They tried to assassinate Jim Jones. They hoped that the public would come alive to the ‘cruelty and evil’ underlying the base, nasty motives of the concerned Relative.
In Jonestown, the People’s Temple was saving tax-paying America hundred’s of thousands of dollars by looking after those for whom the society had no use. Jim Jones had under taken to build a community too those who have been hurt angered, alienated and victimized by adverse conditions that prevail in the declining inner cities of advanced Western society. People’s Temple was only one of a number of progressive groups mark down for destruction, because they were bringing together the poor and the working class and defying racial barriers. The fact that they had been able to create successful survival programs providing food, medical care jobs and vocational training, the fact that they had been able to generate wealth from a ‘cooperative lifestyle’ rather than from the dog eat dog ethic of capitalism and the distributed a free news paper attacking all manifestations of injustice these were the real reasons behind their persecution but unfortunately, people of Jonestown accused Jim Jones of being power hungry which was always ascribed to leaders like Jim Jones who were trying to raise humanity to a higher road. Even Rayan’s delegation member Lane had concluded that was indeed a well- organized conspiracy to destroy the People’s Temple, Jim Jones and Jonestown he said that, if Martin Luther king could see Jonestown would recognize it as the next step in his agenda and he would say“ one, two, three, many more Jonestown’s” (P.33)
‘The Chronicle’, exposed the miracles of Jim Jones. Miracle after was performed that afternoon in Georgetown. He choose at random people he said were sick. One woman was suffering from pain in the head and had a cancerous growth. After his miracle, she suddenly use and a man suffering from knee pains jumped for joy after Jones had prayed for him, a woman’s stomach- ache disappeared; another one’s blood pressure had been cured. So, this act of Jim Jones, he was praised by Timothy Oliver Stoen and he requested Jones to sire a child by his wife. He gives reason for why he invited Jones “he wanted his child to be fathered, if not by me, by the most compassionate, honest and courageous human being the world contains. Timothy Stoen, a bright, energetic, lawyer, was in his early thirties, he joined the People’s Temple with his wife. Grace Stoen as head bookkeeper. A number of cases complained against him. Stoen’s were ordered to leave Guyana within twenty four hours. Even, after Government of Guyana appeared in that case. On this case comrade leader was talking about Human Rights. This slogan “We Will Die For Burnham” shows that how much the people of Guyana believed him.
Shiva Naipaul visited Jones bungalow and explained its richness, Jones has shared the three bed roomed house with his female favorites Maria Katsaris and Carolyn Lavton. He was not healthy man and his behavior implied a degree of mental confusion. Jones told that a visiting Swedish psychologist that all his thoughts were coming from CIA.
Then, Shiva turned into Jonestown, in Jonestown a community in which racism had ceased to exist. It was a community of joy beauty, industry, and accomplishment in which racism had been abolished. People were so free in Jonestown, that freedom caused their eyes to glow. No more drugs, no more realism, no more rapes, no more prisons or jails. As Maria Katsaris described under the title – ‘A Model of Cooperation – Jonestown” Money could not buy the happiness that existed in Jonestown. They had liberated themselves from those lusts. The residents lived according to their ideals and there was contentment. Collectivism had endowed young and old with a new life, they were no longer  ensured by the opiate of religion. The old people had been freed from loneliness and the agony of racism. Diseases like arthritis, debates, kidney ailments, hypertension had been all but vanquished.
There are high relationship here, ones that do not come just out of sex, but by sharing and living the highest ideals. Jonestown showed off its achievements and breakthroughs in agriculture, education, recreation, the arts, medical care and so on. Even Government was so impressed with their endeavors that they called the best model of agriculture in the nation (P.44) and it had much admired the way the school was set up and intended to incorporate some of the same ideal in a school.
As Charles Garry seen Jonestown, a community in which there was no sexism. He could think of no other human grouping in the world, which had been able to solve the problem of male sexual supremacy as had Jonestown. There was no ageism-in Jonestown young, middle aged and old, black, brown, yellow, red and white, male and female, had all succeeded in making a common spiritual life. Every one mixed with everyone else; everyone shared with everyone else. He compared Jonestown with Switzerland’s cleaners and also he blames America by comparing that with Jonestown – In America (United States), the aged were condemned to a life of pauperism and beggary: in Jonestown they flourished in a cocoon of security and compassion. Animals were treated better in Jonestown than human beings were in the United States. Jonestown had provided him with the most egoistic entertainment. Such astounding achievements were possible in Jonestown because the people there were learning the answers to a better life. What was happening at Jonestown was credit to humanity. Jonestown’s isolation from the world was only geographical. A public address system kept everyone in touch with current affairs. Films of all types were shown in the evenings.
As Maria Katsaris praised Jim Jones for allowing her to be a member of his beautiful socialist family and practicing the highest principles of socialism communism.
Rev Moore admired the living arrangements. Single people shared dormitories. Families were given houses. The authorities were receptive to the point of indulgence. Everyone ate and slept in the same in Jonestown. Everyone was expected to work – the workers were out in the fields from early in the morning – an to do so without any hope of special reward beyond the joy of labour itself. Morale was high. Individuals were breaking out of old rats, crossing boundaries and extending themselves. Under Forbes boundaries and extending themselves. Under Forbes Burnham. Guyana had banished its exploiters. Jonestown was a closed journalistic world, cultic in its self-protection and secrecy. Which is beyond he effective jurisdiction of Guyanese authorities.
The Government appointed administrator of Jonestown – Emerson Simon, praised the variety of food of Jonestown meals were always served promptly. Breakfast had three phases between and . The outdoor workers were fed: The seminar citizens had their turn between 7.00 and 7.30 and the children between 7.30 and 8.00 (P.86). Because Jonestown was a ‘rainbow family,’ a mixture of many races, its food deliberately reflected several cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Jonestown’s reading seemed to have been relentlessly political. The People’s Temple established at Jonestown in 1976 with it’s most projected programmed. This religious organization had a number of members like Charles Garry, the Temple’s lawyer, Maria Katsaris wife of Jones,
Mark Lane
, Timothy and Grace Stoen, Linda Amos, who was in charge of the Temple’s Georgetown office, and etc. The People’s Temple was not only agricultural commune in the North West. As Max Krebs, United States Ambassador to Guyana submits the memorandum – (P. 38). There was more purposeful activity going on at the better financed People’s Temple Agricultural project. The main occupation of the Jonestown from pioneers was clearing the jungle; he praised Guyanese for their work from sunrise to sunset. Gradually, the temple insinuated itself into Guyana’s political fabric and marched on behalf of the PNC, flaunting their banners. They were part of the May day celebrations committee, they mounted agricultural exhibitions they played basketball matches against police and army teams. Jim Jones and the Guyana of Forbes Burnham appeared to have a thorough understanding of each other’s needs and also he says about the temple’s involvement in Guyana. The marriage between Jim Jones and the co-operative socialist republic of Guyana rode out the facts and the rumors and proceeded on its understood course. That marriage made in Heaven, between Jim Jones and the Government of Forbes Burnham lasted until that moment when a dump truck full of armed men appeared at the for end of the Kaituma airstrip People’s Temple had done for too much good and helped for too many people for that to be allowed to happen. Which had a legitimate purpose, a noble purpose, and was more or less succeeding and it would prefer to expand energy assisting those who were unhappy to leave.
On this time some body want to destroy the people’s temple. Especially the American Government directed a conspiracy to destroy the People’s Temple.
Shiva Naipaul, the lays emphasis on People’s Temples Agriculture, lay embedded in the mud. Already, weeds were beginning to choke the cultivation. The banana trees gave way to rows of feathery cassava plants. Interspersed with the cassava were tiny plots of sugar cane, citrus and pineapple (P. 81). They were harvesting, an average of two thousand pounds of bananas each month. Pineapples too were said to be thriving in the co-operative atmosphere. Thus, Shiva described the system of Agriculture and Guyana, which population was small, the interior was big. There would always be a need for foreignness. The Guyanese Government had never been afraid of letting people come in – unless there was something very much against them. Even now there were all kinds of groups in the country working peaceably, assisting in its development. All were law-abiding, hardworking farmers, Guyana was not afraid of outsiders. Jones and the peoples Temple had been allowed in on exactly the same conditions and for exactly the same reasons as those other groups, to do agriculture. (P. 82).
 He came to the medical services Laurence Schact MD who would become the temple’s devoted doctor, the bringer of life and the bringer of mass death, was not wholly predictable (P.87). Jonestown’s pharmacopoeia was breathtaking both in quality and quantity and also in variety. One of the commune’s nursing supervisors claimed that these drugs were not only for conventional therapeutic purposes but also to keep the more troublesome residents under control. On the completion of treatment, would be defectors no longer evinced any desire to leave. (P.88) The People’s Temple may very well have modeled its therapies on the practices sanctioned by the behaviors psychologist whose theories seem to dominate these institutions. Jonestown was a manifest not only of mass suicide but of mass devotion which cannot by itself carry the entire moral burden of the Jonestown.
Educational system of Jonestown was ranking nearly equally with its cassava operations. In Jonestown, said the 1977 brochure, education is a way of life which affects all aspects of life. It is our intent to make education relevant to the growth and maturity of the child. Physically, morally, socially, intellectually, artistically and finally with the goal of guiding the child in the acquisition of habits, attitudes and skills such as will enable the child to participate in collective thought, values and activities.
Elementary education went up to the seven Grades, but there were plans for expansion beyond that level. Classes were organized around ability, not age. Each child was allowed to progress at its own speed. The curriculum, apart from reading, writing and arithmetic, included physical and earth science, political science, social science – “with emphasis on Guyanese history and culture – arts, and crafts and music paper and pencil had been replaced by chalkboard an innovation that filled them with pride’ (P.92). The emphasis throughout was on cooperative rather than competitive values. Fundamental to Jonestown’s educational philosophy was the work-study concept (P.92). Cooperative child labour for instance, had helped to build that vital fool of education – the playground.
Shiva Naipaul, described the working system of the People’s Temple, as a former funeral secretary of the Temple Deborah Blakery, - Every vestige of a personal and private life had been systematically rooted out. The most loyal were in the worst physical condition. Day and night it was patrolled by armed guards. No one was allowed to leave unless they had a special reason to do so, and even then permission was granted only to the most trusted. Contact with Guyanese was restricted, allowed only when a temple member was engage on a mission. The Jonestown work schedule was engaged on a mission. The Jonestown work schedule was rigorous to the point of cruelty. Most of them laboured eleven hours a day in the fields. The one hour they were given for lunch was taken up with walking back to kitchen fro the fields and queuing for a miserable handout. They had rice for break fast, rice water soup for lunch, and rice and beans for dinner on Sunday each person receive an egg and a cookie. Vegetables were available two or three times a week. Life at Jonestown was so miserable and the physical plan of exhaustion was so great that this event was not traumatic. Guyanese used to give hard punishment to their children whenever they committed crimes and Blakey described what is punishment to the elders also. The guards stationed around Jonestown to prevent anyone leaving. Those attempting to escape, Jones had said, would be killed and their bodies thrown into the jungle. The casual contact, mail service, telephone call were not permitted. Those who broke the rules were severally punished and deprived of food and sleep, made to the work excessive hours and sometime, forced to eat hot peppers.
Shiva Naipaul only highlighted the Guyanese and Jonestown’s and the People’s Temple’s kindness, development activities, but also the People’s Temple’s and its Jim Jones cruelty over humanity and native land. Armed guard’s sadistic punishments, semi-starvation. Hundreds of cowed and terrorized prisoners – joyless specimens, drugged into submission, overworked, brought to the limits of human endurance, talking only of death. The horror of Jonestown is unrevealed. Even the Michael Porkes, a journalist, experienced that cruelty of temple. As he explained, Jonestown was dealing with all types of social and psychological deviancy. It was a collection of the maimed and the inadequate and the delinquent: and it Jonestown functioned on a high level of ethical behaviours and human devotion you had to see and experience in order to comprehend. Jonestown may not have been paradise to the defectors, but it was paradise for those who had been brutalized by the struggle for existence in America’s ghettos (P.97). This was because of Jim Jones only, he practicing what he preached. So, the vast majority of Temple members did not feel the dislike for Jones. At Jonestown, the aristocrats like him were dealing with not merely wit the victions of faces and racism but simultaneously, with a group of people who fell into certain cold-blooded clinical categories. They were not simply poor and oppressed and in need have love. They were also emotionally disturbed, maladjusted, mentally retarded and hyperactive and all the rest.
The People’s Temple and Jim Jones had been saved – a drug addict, a prostitute, an alcoholic and so on. This is parade of regenerated humanity. In Jonestown as normal as in India. They call the “Sexism” as bullshit people do fuck in Jonestown (P.101). The war between messianic lusts and apostasy became a war between the forces of Good and Evil. The People’s Temple members at Jonestown reveal any indication that inhabitants of Jonestown were reweaving any thing less than normal Guyanese standards of food, clothing, shelter and medical assistance. Exaggeration, Humbag, downright lies all existed in Jonestown. It was not a paradise. But nor was it the hell on earth that its enemies made it out to be. The mass suicides of consular offices Elice and Reece–Jim Jones took it as threat. Jim Jones pleads – “Die with respect, Die with a degree of dignity. Lay down your life with dignity. Don’t lay down with tears and agony. Stop this hysterics. This is not the way for people who are socialistic communists to die. We must die with some dignity.’ (P. 102). Death might taste a little bitter, but the bitterness would not last long nor would it be painful. They took their position, lay down in family groups and writhed to death; death would be the final miracle. It is easy to become obsessed with the deaths, with the final moments of Jones town. The melodrama of the suicides swallows up Jim Jones and the People’s Temple. But Jonestown represents more than those nine hundred bodies. For the People’s Temple as it lived is of much greater significance than the People’s Temple as it died.3
The voice of Michael Prokes, Temple aristocrat, soon take his own life. Here Shiva Naipaul finds reason for why did the people committed suicide. Those who had died at Jonestown had done so willingly built up from nothing as a labour of love was doomed. Jonestown had been made necessary by the failure of America to meet the needs of its poor and its black citizens. For the hundreds who had died there, it had represented the only possible means escapable from lives throttled by daily misery and oppression in the ghettoes. Jones had conferred on then both dignity and freedom. Seeing that freedom and dignity threatened by outside forces, they had preferred to die rather than be restored to the slavery from which they had briefly escaped. It was an act of high moral courage. In death as in life it was their fate to be dishonored by their country.
Socialistic view of temple was not cult. It was socialist movement. Jim Jones had been the exact opposite of a brainwasher;  befuddle of intellect. Jones was first and foremost a teacher. He liberated many minds out of their confuse states by demonstrating where there are huge ghettoes in every large city of America. His crime was not only that, he had understood and spelled out the nature of that sickness, but that he had offered a cure. Even in ‘San Francisco Examiner’ was focused on Jones faith healing exploits – “The prophet Who Raises the Dead.” The People’s Temple was a revolutionary organization led by a dangerous man, bent on destroying our system of Government. Jones was a bad person and that he did terrible things to his members which were proved by the suicide attempt of Michel Porkes (P.111).
On other hand Jim Jones praised by Garry. Fifteen million Americans go to bed hungry in this country every night. Fifty million people live in sub-standard housing when a man like Jim Jones comes forward – he called himself as God and the father to the hungry and wanted and the unloved and offers them something, we then get such a situation as existed in Jonestown. (P.113) which shows the two faces of Jones personality and According to Garry the People’s Temple was active in the Chilean refugee movement. He looked upon the People’s Temple as friends and then he found that many members of the People’s Temple as friends which was ‘moving in the direction of a better world and better society, and also it had fed the hungry, nursed the sick, given shelter to the homeless, visited those in prison. Death had come because there was none among them strong enough or free enough to kick over the vat of cyanide. Death was everywhere. The arms race was death! The abyss governing separate and governed was death; cybernation was death; unemployment was death. Nowhere was death more rampant than the decaying cities where the sense of community of human belongingness had been destroyed. This was the significance of Jonestown it had been an attempt to build a common life, facing away from the forces of death.
The Director of Human Freedom centre said that he could only compared Jones to Hitler as member of the People’s Temple. When Shiva Naipaul talks with her at interview, she disclosed her opinion very frankly.
            So, in this way Shiva had collected the opinions of different peoples like Art, a liberal Democrat, member of the California State Legislature, had been the admirer of the People’s Temple. In San Francisco, Willie Brown, a black Democratic representative in the state legislative and one of the stars of cities liberal establishment, who argued that so many of the victims had been black and because there were no votes to be had in it. There were two of them mother and daughter, who blamed Jonestown’s unconscious projection of the male-dominated nuclear family especially patriarchy of Jonestown. (P.123). They highlighted the seven rules were fixed for women and holism. Shiva disclosed his name to Youngman, who was a man of the World Hunger Project as Indian Government and United nations praised the project. (P.132)
            Shiva Naipaul, then moves on explaining about California, which is the richest and most populous state of the union, the first among equals. It is the state of mind and being. Californians are the ultimate pioneers, a chosen people living in a golden land flowing with milk and honey, whose previous self consciousness makes them more than ordinarily human. California is the placement and known for its ‘Hollywood’. Southern California had managed (P.135) (Los Angels) to create a genuine open society. Los Angels is the headquarters of NASA, the National Aeronautics and space Administration. (P. 136). Naipaul compares it with San Francisco, which was an older town, with a long established aristocracy. Money there was hidden, used more discreetly and San Francisco does have more orthodox pretensions to sophistication and refinement is undeniable. California is thronged not only with seekers of fame and fortune but seekers of new selves who have deliberately served their ties with the past. Thus, Shiva highlights life of California.4
            Again Shiva Naipaul explains about the People’s Temples bids of things after massacre of Guyana. On that occasion lot of articles are published in number of newspapers and magazines. Jim Jones had taken members of his flock on vacations, that had criss-crossed the North America continent. ‘Paster Jones goes on no vacation ‘said the Temple newspaper in 1973. After some days Jim Jones arrived, and his theme that night was the subordination of personal desire in the pursuit of human betterment. Love of money was the root of all evil. Jim Jones had been one of the recipients of the Martin Luther King Humanitarian awards. (P.150) and also he was named chairman of the San Francisco Housing authority and The People’s Temples work had been praised by Walter Mondale, Vice-President of the United States. Its deep involvement in the major social and constitutional issues of country had been inspired him. Jim Jones was praised for his maintenance of The People’s Temple when he was outside.(P.94)
            Jim Jones, now settled in Indianapolis, In 1956 after a number of sorties he finally established a church he called the People’s Temple. Jones liked and loved Stalin. Bonnie Thielmann lays emphasis on the background of Jim Jones and also his idealism. How he adopted himself to all these activities of The People’s Temples, and how he develops that, he called himself as the ‘Prophet of God’. (P.170)
            At the ending part of the Black and White Shiva Naipaul turns towards the student federation and their protest against the Government with the leadership of Barkely, home of the biggest, most sought after and most notorious of cradle. Students think and demand justice for all humanity, with no exceptions. Buckminister Fuller was proclaiming. The world students are the world revolutionaries. These were the most literate students in all history, the most world-minded; the most free from national and class bias, the healthiest and a higher species of humanity. They alone possessed vision; they alone could save mankind from certain destruction. This Free Speech movement had turned into the Filthy Speech movement. In this issue Shiva Naipaul highlighted Ronald Reagan’s State of emergency and Sigmund Freud universities across the country had been hit by a backlash of realism. Students were dull, uncurious and apathetic, minds narrowly focused on their course of study and their personal futures. It was only that in Berkely, given its colourful past, the change stood out more starkly. But students saw themselves as world wise and practical, they had heads screwed on the right way. At the time of Indo-China war on after 1970. (P.180) All of sudden the Universities had decided to reform themselves. Some of the more progressive reforms were even rescinded. The idea was that the students were going to dedicate themselves to reconstituting the University and turn it into a mechanism which would reconstitute society. Now these affluent young people said they wanted to change the world.
            Shiva Naipaul also eyes on the black and white people. Blacks see whites as the enemy and Whites see blacks as a threat. In America, groups of blacks stand on corners, doing nothing, watching the cruising police cars. Even they don’t have voting power in Jonestown. The US is a difficult country in which to work for freedom and hard to struggle here. America was too big, too powerful, to overwhelming. Nevertheless, the black panthers were not either completely routed or daunted by the magnitude of the task facing them. They were survivors. They got political existence in America. Oakland Community started in 1971, was their main source of pride. (P.187). Thus Shiva Naipaul, explained how the black people stand in political field of America under the leadership of Huye. Huye examined the activities of the People’s Temple and Jones – the said that Jones had tortured his black followers with nightmare visions of imminent fascist take-over and genocidal doom. He used them to bind and entrap. (P.197). The Revolution was long dead; so, for all practical purposes, were the Panthers and everything they had stood for. All the militant black voices of the sixties had been effectively silenced.
            The sixties, despite the gains that had been made in civil rights had left the racial structure of American Society essentially instinct. Lincoln University, a black college in Pennsylania. (P.198)
Jim Jones built his movement of the debris of the sixties: When, with his small band of followers, he made his Hejira from Indiana to California in 1965 and In 1972, the People’s Temple moved out of its rural lair in Northern California and made San Francisco its headquarters.(P.214) and it was laid out along the latitudinal and longitudinal grids of the fundamental imagination :an imagination obsessed with sin and image of apocalyptic destruction. Jim Jones, son of the small town Mid-West, grafted his primitive visions of socialist sharing and racial justice. In this way Shiva Naipaul picturized the all aspects of Guyana, especially Jim Jones and the People’s Temple.

REFERENCE:
1.      The Guyana Chronicle: ‘Talking about Education‘ Black and White, p. 70.
2.      Allan Callahan ‘Shiva Naipaul’s African Journey.’
3.      Shiva Naipaul, ‘Article - Contemporary Literary Criticism -1945.’
4.      Geoffrey Wheatcroft, ‘Shiva Naipaul: Sardonic Genius,’ Saturday 13th August 2005.


CHAPTER-IV
THE CONFRONTATION OF CASTE IN THE
CHIP CHIP GATHERERS

The Chip Chip Gatherers was set in Trinidad, and explores a society in Transition. The new is presented in this book by the Ramsarans, a poor family trying to break into middle class Shiva Naipaul ironically presents the feelings of both elements of society which was published in 1973.1 He portrays “a world where feelings have gone dead from despair and helpless”. Problems of individual and cultural identity are recurrent themes of his novels. Critics note many similarities between Shiva Naipaul’s thematic concerns and attitudes and these of his brother, the novelist V. S. Naipaul. The Chip Chip Gatherers has often been compared to V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas to its detriment.2 It is clear that was very much his own, and a fascination with the politics of identity that would never leave him. In 1973, the Chip Chip Gatherers, won award for him.
The narrative core of the Chip Chip Gatherers is the praise and fall of Egbert Ramsaran seen through eyes of wickedly perspective- narrator of the book harshly judge mentor community and Egbert’s somewhat bewilders on Wilbert, Egbert Ramsaran who taught himself to read and left has families shabby home rather than remain in the settlement. “A fate that filled him with terror, (P.30). He had cast all scruple aside and driven himself to the brink of nervous collapse, had gradually obscured the original purpose of that struggle. Developer and obsession with power after becoming the healthy proprietor of a tracking company in near by Victoria. He took his economic goodwill to bully the people with whom he grave up “the leaving representatives of the fate he had so narrowly avoided(P.30). “Egbert Ramsaran constrict virtually his entire will on the descriptive goal of mentally diverting himself from his origin by terrorizing and humiliating it inhabitants, who regularly come to his house has supplicants “He grew to demand on them- “to convince himself that his escape was neither dream nor elusion(P.30). They endorsed his insults and tyranny because they too need reassurance that it is guessable to break out of the settlement “ no matter how unpromising everything seemed”.(P.27) Clearly the settlement assumes a metaphorical hellishness but they can be little doubt that the quotidian reality these cane country villages, with their squalor and hopelessness, was dream indeed.”
Egbert’s need for self ascertain and self-sufficiency is so total that he is incapable of affection. He is “animated by no idea larger than himself.” And thus his “tried to nothing” (P.20). Given the prominence of the concept of nothingness in Naipaul’s writing the significance of this letter phrase probably extends well beyond its immediate sowal frame of reference Egbert’s self imposed separateness is in an old way, the one true link between his experience and humanity because in Shiva Naipaul’s world everyone is some awful fundamental sense,’ tried to nothing’. The mere social implications of Egbert’s monomania are bad enough, however, for all the people around him. He keeps his illegitimate Singh on an estate in the country that is a discovered untended wasteland”(P.40), he refuses to have anything to do with his favored brothers and he is particularly cruel to his wife, Rani, a homely settlement woman whom he marries largely to demonstrate his scorn for a independence from Trinidad’s wealthy Indian families, like Khoja family, as highlighted in fireflies, only one.
The Chip Chip Gatherers can been seen, through the widest lance has a drama pitting individual acts of will against the chillingly powerful tendency towards this organization and decay that constantly threatens the self and all its fragile structure. Although Naipaul’s characters stubbornly resist entrapment in situations that render their lives meaningless, what they most fear, and what cast a fall over their actions in the possibility nothingness in the ineluctable ground of their being a great dusk mean that spit them out and will swallow them up again. This anxiety is such a pervasive and persistent force in the Chip Chip Gatherers that the dialectic between tradition and Creolization.
Egbert Ramsaran’s own entrance into the wider society of Trinidad has less to do with the politics of Creolization than with his obsessive fear of the void. For Egbert Ramsaran, the settlement is its most visible sign ‘decay’, the novel’s narrator observes – her reserve remained impenetrable and, in spite of his efforts, Egbert Ramsaran could coax nothing more out of her. What was happened between her mother and Egbert Ramsaran could not be ignored. It fell like a poisonous shadow between them, blocking the development of friendship. If anything her embarrassment with regard to him was greater than it was with his swift startling and irreversible (P.170). Physical decoration, the decline from youth and beauty is swift, startling and irreversible (P.172), but more ominously, even individual identities seem to decompose Ramsaran tries to recreate himself to escape from this fate. Egbert Ramsaran was almost shouting and he builds a new identity, a house, a business. He had more money in business, he had enough cloths to wear and food to eat and a wife and a family, he was the happiest man on this earth all to stave off the destructive process epitomized by the settlement. Even before leaving the settlement, he contemptuously dismissed it as “a Dung heap” (P.13), a place of decomposition, a place of waste. After moving from his parents hut to Port–of–Spain, he changes his name from Ashok to Egbert and becomes a presbyteries, but his motives are severally practical”(P.15). He is not interested in acceptance by the wealthy commercial families; indeed, he spurns them by choosing Rani has his wife. His conversion and name change or only means to an end; power or more precisely a mischief sense of security springing from an act of sheer will.
For many years Egbert rules with unquestioned authority from “the seat of his empire (P.17). It was in Victoria Egbert Ramsaran elected to establish the seat of his empire and raised the gaunt fortress of a building which together with the red and black trucks was the irrefutable and concrete expression of his achievement. The headquarters of the Ramsaran transport company bestrode the eastern main road out of Port–of-Spain as it unraveled itself through the small town. It was the chief building of the place and its most common point of reference. Everything revolved around the ‘depot’ – as it was designated since everything could be located as being to the right or left of the ‘depot’: or to the back or front of the ‘depot’. Around and about it, Victoria had anchored itself. Ultimately, the ‘depot’ became a virtual abstraction, like the lines of longitude and latitude on a map. Here in Victoria, Egbert Ramsaran reigned supreme and unquestionable. His company’s fortress like headquarters in the town of Victoria. But after his wife Rani dies his psychological versifications begin to show signs of erosion.
There was a subtle at first almost imperceptible change of mood and temper in Egbert Ramsaran following Rani’s death. The distant cordiality with which he had treated Basdai was extended to the remote speculations persisted. He became marginally more open and communicative. His odd gaiety surprised and some what disturbed Wilbert. The tiny hints of characteristics indulgence he had begun to exhibit towards himself more than a burden had been lifted from him by her death. A lifetime iron restraint was weakening. Egbert Ramsaran was losing the desire to cling to the rope he had spun across the abyss. He was running out of energy. He was tired. Freed of one burden to be freed of all burdens (P.69).
It is at this point that Basdai introduces her son-in-law to Sushila. Immediately Egbert sees the advantage of having reasonably attractive.
Sita is the novel’s story- teller. She develops “the habit of talking to herself “and quickly discovers that through her subtle secrete magic” she can create, destroy and deconstruct the bird around her” (P.171). Sita was silent under this on slaughter. There were many things she could have said but she had no idea how to begin saying them. Silence would descend with unpremeditated suddenness, revealing gaps of deadening incomprehension which Sushila- never Sita – endeavored to bridge with a rush of extravagant nonsense; promising her more books, more dresses, more toys. To Sita, Sushila had been an exotic manifestation, a shifting impermanent combination of scent and sound and color. When she was younger, Sita puzzled for hours over this curious creature people called her mother and whose irregular manifestations threw the settlement onto such frenzy of disapproval and outrage. This is how she copes with Basdai’s abuse with being called workless, the child of a “no good mother“ (P.171) all around her she saw people drawn together and welded into comprehensible wholes by relationships denied her; the elementary ties of husband and wife; brother and sister. Excluded from membership of any these, Sita belonged to no one (P.172). She sets herself apart from the others, cultivates a belief in her own singular destiny”. And invests every act she performs with a ritual significance” that is part of grand design”. Naipaul makes it clear, by placing this passage immediately before one describing the horrors of the settlements decay, that Sita’s magic–essentially perspective.
Few characters in this book aside from Sita, share those sentiments: few in fact have any regard words or understood their magic. The settlement people consider Sita’s reading simply a form of pretence. Mrs. Bholdi sees to it that her own children are educated, but her purpose in doing so is purely utilitarian. It will enhance their social status enabling Julian to go to medical school one day and the daughter to make suitable marriages. The same can be said of Egbert Ramsaran: who taught himself to read as a means of making his way of in the world outside settlement but in later life reads only “ popular accounts of the second world was (P.20) and chief detective stories. His son, Wilbert is not interested reading at all, only Julian Bholai comes close to sharing Sita’s sensitivity to literature, but even he does not share her comprehension of the power of words.
Julian is wine, pampered boy who was son of Vishnu Bholai, Jullian enjoys his surreptions meetings with Sita, when the library man makes its periodic visits to the neighborhood, but he is in no way committed to her. Sushila’s campaign against Sita was fuelled by the regular visits of Julian Bholai and whispered conversations in the verandah; whatever the initial drift of her attack it came inevitably to pivot on him. Although she is more attached him, she is “under no illusions as to the outcome of their friendship (P.234). Long before, Julian’s departure from England, Sita has learned “to teach and to train herself to be dispassionate by keeping a diary which becomes her primary“technique of self presentation.” (P.235). by writing down everything that happened between them Sita was able to distance herself. She wrote down their conversations word for word and read them over to herself. She might have been writing about two people who were strangers to her. Sita represented in the diary was not Sita who wrote the diary (P. 235).
Through this and similar strategies- all involving her power to refashion situations through the imaginative use of language. Sita endures first the settlement then four years of living in the Ramsarans house and finally her mother’s mental decoration and growing hostility towards her. In contrast to Egbert Ramsaran who tosses his detective stories, dust and turn to junk, Sita invest in her diary and other books and almost talismanic significance. For this reason, Ramsaran’s last and bassets at of cruelty breaks Sita’s spirit. Realizing that Ramsaran’s Sushila is not coming back, he takes out the fall force of his fury on her daughter, commanding her together all them expensive book (P.248) and burn them. Sita complies fittingly; the blast of heat from this fire precipitates Egbert’s strake. And although Sita sees the world as a dead and arid place (P.255). From this point on, she does survive. Securing a clerical position in a Government ministry and sitting off for Port–of-Spain to begin a new phase of her life. It is perhaps a hopeful that Sita, before saying good bye to Wilbert sits down for a movement to collect her thoughts because she tells him that what people do in Russian novels.
Wilbert armed with neither his father’s iron will nor Sita’s imagination drifts into what Sita, with her mastery of language has been able to conceptualize explicitly and face down: a life ‘riddled with futility (P.255). trained to do nothing but run the tracking the company in the manner of his father and lacking the ability even to do that Wilbert is trapped in a life of which ‘the pattern the very stuff’ (P.292) is random skein of accidents. Nothing he does matters, he reflects numbly. In such a frame of mind and to escape the “ghosts” that haunt the Ramsaran house, he begins to spend more and more time with the Bholias, who constitute loosely speaking the novels comic norm, when he visited their house has a boy, Wilbert had looked at heir family photographs on the walls and beheld a world he had never known: a vision. However perverse and distorted of tender, sentiment and pride up (P.177). Long before, his mother Rani had tried to offer him a glimpse of such a world, but already too much his father’s son, he had spurned it. Now he returns to the Bholai household and despite the constant bickering he witnesses there he is passionate by the ‘routines of family life (P.297). But Wilbert is like tourist in exotic climes. Although he marries Shanty Bholai, he cannot descend from the save holding ‘aristocrats’ (P.39) of the period before emancipation, when sugarcane made many white fortunes. In the last century and a half of a colonial rule, families like the St. Pieres continued to cultivate cane using indentured labor from India.
Shiva Naipaul, explores the separateness of the protagonist of the Chip Chip Gathered very analytically and his settlement without his family. At the ending of this book Egbert Ransaran was died because after his death Wilbert managed business things of his father and faced lot of problems because of his inability to run a business. Thus, the family of Egbert Ramsaran ended in a dramatic scene.

REFERENCE:
  1. Shiva Naipaul, ‘Sardonic Genius,’ Geoffrey Wheatcroft.
  2. Patrick French’s, ‘Biography of V. S. Naipaul,’ Naipaul’s friendship with Paul Theroux – ‘Telegraph’.
CHAPTER-V
CONCLUSION
            It’s a found the imperialistic note among the Shiva Naipaul’s works. Which is reflected in all fields of the life of those Shiva highlighted throughout his literary career. The phenomenon of imperialism however became gradually synonymous with colonialism, and the later word soon lost the prestige it commanded in the early sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the current times use it more generally, for domination of one country by another country, or by the rules of another country,1 but this process has been an evitable part of human existence from times immemorial. The phenomenon has, however, always been an event which has had its impact on the culture of colonized. The imperialistic forces started to adopt an attitude of moral superiority. Imperialism is essentially about power both as end and means. Behind the stirring slogans, the marital symbols, and the facade of empire can be found superior military, economic, political or moral power. Even in Shiva Naipaul’s Fireflies, ‘Sugarcane’ factories play the major role in remunerates the life of those who are poor, suffering for poor and etc. The impact of industrial revolution reflected in the all work of Shiva Naipaul.
            The great manufacturing nation’s embraced on a policy of so called imperialism, which means the business of adding distant territories for the purpose of controlling their products, getting the trade with the natives, and investing money in the development of natural resources.  Sometimes this imperialism took the form of outright annexation: again it assumed the form of a “protectorate” which proclaimed the intention of taking advantage of a country’s resources without undertaking the full responsibility of governing it.”2
            It is more than ironic that such a colonial attitude reveals the imperialistic psyche as more wanting in completeness, or rather, as one which reveals a highly aggressive spirit which is in turn, symptomatic of inferiority. Its George Nadel and Perry Curit’s opine that ‘colonialism’ has been weighed drone with original sin almost since its inception” and state that colonialism does imply imperial expansion but that imperialistic expansion does not necessarily imply colonialism. And imperialism is most commonly used today to connate the oppression, humiliation or exploitation of indigenous peoples. The impact of the colonizer was terrifying for the colonized because of the rapid socio-cultural changes that occur and the problems the native has trying to adjust to the new developments, especially on native or indigenous peoples has taken many forms. The loss of life, the amount of suffering, the irreparable damage done to native cultures in sum the destructive elements of imperialism cannot be measured in figures alone. This meant an induction of a strong complex in the native mind from which the individual in the commonwealth countries is still striving to recover. Chinua Achebe, the celebrated African novelist, comments upon the African writer’s persistent attempts at becoming ‘universal’ and says, I know the source of our problem, of course, Anxiety. Africa has had such a fate in the world that the very adjective ‘African,’ can still call up hideous fears of rejection. Under a system of colonial rule, the adjustments of customs, traditions and laws to the requirements of modern life was different if not impossible.14 the way of imperialism was smoothed by the missionaries. In the opinion of B.N. Ganguly “Imperialism is violence political, economic, cultural and psychological.” And according to Gandhi, also “colonialism was broad based violence.”
            The view of colonies as objects of exploitation reached one of its extremes in the Belgin Cango where Ceopold and his agents deliberately destroyed the traditional culture and society in order to create a submissive working class. No country had a monopoly of virtue and wisdom. The Irony or rather tragedy of British colonial policy is not to be found in the white settlement colonies, but in India and other native lands in the Empire. The social exclusiveness of Englishmen toward the non-white subjects, the insistence on a color has more than offset the advantages gained through decentralized rule.
            Specialists from all disciplines lament the declining influence colonialism proved to be Herbert Lutty traces the traumatic effects back to the nineteenth century. The effects were as irreversible as colonialism, irremediably broke up the old patterns of tribal or feudal societies, and discredited everywhere the institutions, customs, rites and ways of life of these societies, without offering an understandable and assimilate alternative. All these societies had been perfectly capable of governing themselves in the traditional way of life; very few of them were able to cope with the organizational technological and social problems created by this contact with a civilization as foreign as Maritan invasion.
            It was, thus, forcing, ‘modernism’ upon the natives, pursing the logic, it could be surmised that the changes one might have anticipated to come about in the course of centuries were suddenly forced upon the natives. The colonialism was also a process of adjustment to a different order, an attempt at establishing a new tradition.
            In spite of the fact that the colonist’s main object in establishing links with the Asian and African countries was trade and commerce, which gradually gave way to imperialistic subordination. India has a comparatively better deal that Africa, Blacks were hypothesized. African countries were being backward, except for Egypt it could offer no effective resistance to Europe, and so the European powers fell on it in a mad race for empire and divided up this huge continent. The European power fell “like virtues on Africa and divided it amongst themselves.” For the blacks, a longer colonial rule meant a stronger induction of the guilt complex for their pigmentation. So, much so, that in recent years there was a violent assertion that ‘Black is Beautiful’, which is an reality a psychological reaction to the ignominy suffered during the past century. The problem in the Caribbean society is still a live one. Shiva Naipaul finds it like this, “to put it bluntly, it was not a society at all. It was an amorphous collection of Individuals. Nothing bound these people together. It was corroded to its foundation by the acid of race and colour prejudice. Colour ultimately, was of greater consequence than wealth, religion and educational attainment. Like the permafrost of the Siberian steppes which ripples plant life, so could nothing of value grow on the prejudice eroded soil of the West Indies. Especially Trinidad in his fiction ‘Fireflies’ and many other works.
            V.S. Naipaul’s reaction is more evident : “I knew Trinidad to be unimportant, uncreative, cynical.” and also ‘the threat of failure, the need to escape: this was the prompting of the society I know,” It is no wonder, then, that almost all the celebrated novelists of the West Indies prefer not to live in their homeland. Even Shiva Naipaul also, was got the citizenship of London,3 later he went to America. But for a novelist like Chinua Achebe, who has a deeper understanding of and concern for his land and his people, the solution does not lie in running away but rather in staying and trying to mend matters, because he known the source of our problem of course. ‘Anxiety’… But running away from myself seems to me a very inadequate way of dealing with an anxiety. And if writer should opt for such escapism, who is going to meet the challenge?
            This, ironically, has proved to be a blessing in disguise to commonwealth literature in general and African literature in particular. Because of this anxiety, the reaction in literature is so intense that it commands a vitality and vigor that is unsurpassed. This is perhaps because of the zeal to undo in the shortest period of time what the colonialist have done in such a long course of time.
             Colonialism affected a social and cultural structure and almost completely overhauled the native ethos. Tradition is a pregnant word which represents a whole civilization. What T. S. Eliot meant by the term ‘tradition’ would be of considerable interest. Tradition involves all these habitual actions, habits and customs, from the most significant religious rite to our conventional way of greeting a stranger. Culture is not something that cannot be thrust upon a society nor can it even be transplanted. At best, it could be imbibed into a foreign culture, but only if the native culture with which this alien culture comes in contact is receptive enough. In this sense perhaps the traditions and the culture that the white immigrants had brought with them became cumbersome in their attempts at establishing and nurturing new traditions, new culture and civilization in colonial countries.
            Imperialist generally involves the collision of two or more cultures and a subsequent relationship of unequal exchange between or among them. What confuses the issue has been the inability of men to analyze their real motives for territorial or cultural expansion and to separate them from rationalizations devised after the fact. The inevitability of imperialism and the resultant absorption of the cultural values need not be commented upon.
            As Shiva Naipaul, the talented younger brother of the Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul, Trinidian and British novelist, Naipaul once described his life as “defined by three poles that don’t meet” A Hindu of Indian decent, he was born and raised in the West Indies island nation of Trinidad and settled in England at the age of nineteen. The central concerns of his works are the social and political conditions in Third World countries. Naipaul portrays “a world where feeling has gone dead from despair and helplessness,” according to Peter Levi “Problems of individual and cultural identity are recurrent themes in Naipaul’s” novels. Critics note many similarities between Shiva Naipaul’s thematic concerns and attitudes and those of his brother V. S. Naipaul.
            Naipaul’s first two novels, Fireflies and the Chip-Chip Gatherers, are family sagas set in Trinidad, and each explores a society in transition. The old order is represented in the Fireflies by the declining Khoja dynasty, Fireflies is a massive chronicle, in two parts, of the fortunes (good and bad) of Vimla Lutchman (nicknamed Baby) Shiva Naipaul wrote this first novel in 1960’s and published in 1970, which is social satire. The principal characters of this novel are–Vimala Lutchman, Ram Lutchman, Bhaskar, Romesh, Govind Khoja, and Sumintra Khoja. Shiva Naipaul portrays different types of subjects of 1960’s family or family life, Caribbean, power, personal or social, Race, Religion, Manners or customs, Ethnic groups, Idealism, Rites or ceremonies, clans and Port-of-Spain, Trinidad are the Locales of Fireflies.
            Baby Lutchman is the rather passive wife of an undistinguished bus driver, but being the great-niece of the elder Mrs. Khoja, She is circumscribed by the impressive social and material background of the Khojas, one of the wealthiest, most powerful, and most important families in the region. The Khojas are an important Indian family in Trinidad. At their head Mr. Govind Khoja, piously enshrined by his flock of quarrelsome sisters, and at the bottom of the hierarchy is the girl who becomes Mrs. Lutchman, who scrapes a living by running a roadside.
            The leading clan of Trinidad’s Hindu community, with a stagnating fortune and an amended ancestry to back their claims, the Khojas pride themselves on being the guardians of Brahmin tradition. By the time we see them they are hopelessly ingrown, imperious in their prejudice, absurdly committed to a pretense of noblesse oblige political duty. Govind Khoja, the patriarch, who fancies himself the heir to Roussceau and Gandhi while reserving all the privileges of his station; his tyrannically ignorant sisters who beat their children on principle and complete in sniffing out and snuffing out modern nations. Stinging caricatures all save for Mrs. Lutchman who is the real heroine and only a nice to the great ones, and her husband and sons who bear the burnt of the family’s folly. There’s much to laugh at in the elaborate mockery of this comedy of manners, but too much conviction and detail for the bitter ending to be dismissed. A clear, close view a clear, close view through a jaundiced eye, and unexpected engrossing.
            The Fireflies and the Chip-Chip Gatherers as well turned but slight novels, and the passage of years has preserved them well without transmuting them into classics. Both were set in Trinidad; for both Naipaul’s, the island that one sought to escape and the other sought to explore was a necessary source of material. The Fireflies offered a hunting image to set against the plight of those who couldn’t get away: fireflies trapped in a bottle, casting a beautiful, light, but unable to find an escape. The Chip-Chip Gatherers has often been compared to V. S. Naipaul’s A House for My Biswas,” to its detriment. It is clear from both novels, though, that Shiva had a way of seeing that was very much his own and a fascination with the politics of identity that would never leave him.
            For all comparisons with his brother and although he lived in Vidia’s Shadow, Shiva was his own man, starving to find a voice that was imitative. His best writing would come from that fierce need to write himself into existence and to become ‘properly real.’ When this drive, almost primal in its intensity, was married to his ability to step back and observe the world around him, Shiva Naipaul could produce alarmingly acute work. In ‘North of South,’ he set out to explore the relationships between ‘black, brown and white’ in Africa, to find out what ideas like ‘liberation’ and ‘revolution’ might mean to ordinary people.
            North of South reveals the picture of the all fields of Africa and its glory degenerate, corrupt and lazy. What really stands out is how Africans have taken Western ideas and applied them to their own situation, often with laughable results. Take the case of Tanzanian socialism. Naipaul can barely contain a chuckle at the absurdity of this situation. Almost everyone he meets praises the administration, but almost no one has any true sense of what it’s all about. The corruption is truly astonishing. Bribery abounds everywhere, especially at border crossing, where tourists are routinely harassed and threatened with imprisonment if their papers aren’t in order. A story in which Naipaul is conned when he gets a shoeshine is a good example. Not only does the guy rain his shoes, he tries to overcharge him in the process. Naipaul constantly has to shell out the backs to get even the most basic services, if he gets them at all. Hotels are run down traps, prostitution is epidemic, and even here there is the danger that the black Government will step in at any minute and expel the whites.
            Probably, the outstanding aspect of North of South and one that costs Naipaul shows in regards to the “Asian” population in Africa. The “Asians” are actually of Indian decent, as is Naipaul. Naipaul reveals that Africans are prejudiced against these Indians and he seems to take it personality. Much time is spent on this problem and it opens Naipaul up to charges of retaliatory prejudice. Naipaul is much more effective when he shows how both blacks and whites have their racist attitudes, and how both races have been brought down together through the process of colonialism as well as imperialism.
            As Africa liberated from imperialism, Shiva Naipaul traveled through East Africa looking for answer to one question. “How wide is the gap between the rhetoric of liberation and its day-to-day manifestations?” The question may should wonkish, but Naipaul’s answers and quest for them, recounted in this book, were anything but, North of South is vivid, caustic, biting, prescient and insightful journey through a deep in transition. While the famous Naipaul’s arrogance is evident here, Shiva also had a gift for the absurd details that make his harshest observations funny and compassionate and even moving. Today we can see that much of what he encountered is still relevant, and that his question back then was the right one: The gap was and still is, wide indeed. But in the end, it is the dialogue he captured, the descriptions he rendered and the people he met that make this one of the best travel books of all time.4 Which is a combination travelogue and political essay focusing on race relations in Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia. Welded to the descriptions of people and scenery are sharp observations on class, racism, Government and colonialism. Naipaul’s eye misses nothing during his travel, and his anecdotes are both humorous and sad. It was interesting to see that this guy is the brother of V. S. Naipaul. Anyway, this book is not going to be found on the syllabus of any black studies classes anytime soon.
            Travelogues are partly based on what is witnessed, observed and noted about the places and people visited and what is already known in advance, mainly from an existing archive. The archive, therefore, is an important element in travel writing. Shiva Naipaul’s extensive reliance on the existing pre-and colonial time archive of writing on Africa seriously undermines his representation of life in post colonial East Africa. The result is a travelogue filled with a great sense of personal disappointment with the political, cultural, economic and social conditions in Post-Colonial Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia the countries that he visits. Shiva seems to unwittingly translate this sense of deep disappointment into a demonisation of Eastern Africa. Whilst acknowledging that there is a difference and an important one between a text and the world that is seeks to represent, the key proposition in this paper is that Naipaul’s biography does not offer any represent, redemptive characterization of both the African space and the people that the writers about precisely because it summons a biased archive as evidence for its own claims.
            Among Shiva Naipaul’s best known books was “Journey to Nowhere : A New World Tragedy,” published in 1978 mass suicide in Guyana of more than 900 members of the People’s Temple sect from California. The peoples Temple leaded by Jim Jones. The peoples Temple came to Guyana for practice the agriculture. Guyana was the only co-operative republic country in the world. Especially named as ‘Black and White’, which shows light on all aspects like, political, social, educational, religious life of Guyana. Shiva describes how was the relation between the Government of Guyana and the People’s Temple, and what were the activities of the peoples temple and how did the peoples temple helps the poor, hungry people etc. Shiva Naipaul describes the educational system-technical, and agricultural, and political situation of Guyana, especially comrade leader Forbes Burnham, and cabinet colleagues, Shiva gave more stress Jim Jones’ attitude towards the people of Guyana and the Peoples Temple’s members.
            At the end of the book, Shiva Naipaul explained about the mass suicide in Guyana, especially those who were very much related to the Peoples Temple. Shiva also described the beauty of Jonestown which is the headquarters of the People’s Temple, Los Angels Hollywood, and San Francisco’s natural beauty and etc. Totally in this book, Shiva describes each and every aspects of life in Guyana.
            ‘Beyond the Dragons’s Mouth,’ published in 1974. which is collection of stories and some stories about different places, especially from England, India, and Africa and also about Christians and Muslims and Islands in this book Shiva Naipaul, described “Nehru as un Englishman’ and India is secular state is, so afraid of its minorities, so wracked by the mischief’s of Pakistan that it has sacrificed Hindustan as a nation, and refused to accord it legitimacy.” Shiva Naipaul, it may be pointed out, was a most traveled writer and died suddenly in 1985 at the age of 40 and was highly prized for his literary flair even at that young age. Like his elder brother V. S. Naipaul, he too came to India to search for his ethnic Hindu roots. He was greatly disgusted by the political obscenity of dynastic installation of Rajiv after the assassination of Indira Gandhi.
            Naipaul said in an interview that regards his fiction and non-fiction as one body of work because his non-fiction research has yielded experiences and information that he has developed in his novels. His recent novel, A Hot country (1983), is evidence of this, for it is fictional, political volatile country of Cuyma, a thinly disguised version of Guyana. Shiva Naipaul, in this way, touches all fields of Africa and America, each and every aspect were highlighted in these books.

REFERENCE:
1.      Lutty, Herbert, “Colonizationation and The Making of Mankind,” Imperialism and Colonialismed, George H. Nadel, Perry Curtis London Macmillan, 1964, p. 27
2.      Robinson, James Harvey “International Trade and Competation,” Ordeal of Civilization, New York: Harpess 1926, p. 619
3.      Geoffrey Wheatcroft, “Shiva Naipaul: Sardonic Genius.”
4.      Shiva Naipaul, “North of South”, Kenya and Tanzania Published, 1978.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
1.      Allan Callahan, “Shiva Naipaul’s African Journey,” July, 1995
2.      Arena, “The Strange Luck of V. S. Naipaul.”
3.      Bhikhu Parekh, ’What is Multiculturalism’.
4.      Clifford, J, “The Predicament of Culture,” (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988)
5.      During. S, “Postmodernism or Post Colonialism,” Landfall 155, 39, 3, 1985, P. 379.
6.      Gavani D. B. – Literary Criticism and Theory, Navinidu Publications Gadag, 2007
7.      Geoffrey Wheatcroft, ‘Shiva Naipaul: Sardonic Genius,’ Saturday 13th August 2005.
8.      Idowu Whilliam and Kamal-Raj “Ethnicity, Ethnicism and Citizenship: A Philosophical Reflection on the African Experience,” 2004, J.Soc.sci,8(1): 45-58(2004).
9.      In Mommsen, J and Osterhammel J,  Imperialism and After.”
10.  Lutty, Herbert, “Colonizationation and The Making of Mankind,” Imperialism and Colonialismed, George H. Nadel, Perry Curtis London Macmillan, 1964.
11.  Martin Amis, ‘New Statesman,’ April 1973 Black and White by Shiva Naipaul as reprinted in The War Against Cliché, see also http://www. scribd.com/doc/971098/Martin-Amis-The-War-Against-Cliche-Essays-Reviews-vl-0
12.  Masel, C., ‘Late Landings: Reflections on Belatedness in Australian and Canadian Literatures’, in White, J., (Eds), Recasting the world: Writing After Colonialism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
13.  Mishra, V. and Hodge, B., ‘What is Post (-) Colonialism?’ in Frow, J. and Morris, M. (Eds.), Australian Cultural Studies Reader (St. Leonards, New South Wales: Allen & Unwin, 1993).
14.  Mishra, V., ‘Postcolonial Differend: Diasporic Narratives of Salman Rushdie’, Ariel, 26, 3, 1995.
15.  Patrick French’s, ‘Biography of V. S. Naipaul,’ Naipaul’s friendship with Paul Theroux – ‘Telegraph’.
16.  Richard F. Patteson, ‘Caribbean Passages- A Critical Perspectives on New Fiction.’
17.  Ridley, H., ‘Images of Imperial Rule,’ (London: Croom Helm, 1983).
18.  Robinson, James Harvey “International Trade and Competation,” Ordeal of Civilization, New York: Harpess 1926.
19.  Robinson, R., ‘The Excentric Idea of Imperialism, with or Without Empire,’ In Mommsen, J. and Osterhammel, J., (Eds), Imperialism and After Continuities and Discontinuities (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986).
20.  Sardonic Genius, Saturday, 13th August 2005 Geoffrey Wheatcroft
21.  Selmon, S. “The Scramble for Post-Colonialism,” in Tiffin and Lawson (eds) “Describing Empire.”
22.  Shiva Naipaul, ‘Article - Contemporary Literary Criticism -1945.’
23.  Shiva Naipaul, ‘Sardonic Genius,’ Geoffrey Wheatcroft http://www. spectaror.co.uk/the-magazine/features/14024/sardonic-genius.thtml
24.  Shiva Naipaul, “North of South”, Kenya and Tanzania Published, 1978.
25.  Shiva Naipaul, “Secularism Sacrificed the Idea of Hindustan and Refused to Accord to Legitimacy,”
26.  Slemon, S., ‘The Scramble for Post-colonialism’, in Tiffin and Lawson (eds), Describing Empire.
27.  Spivak, G., ‘Can the Subaltern speak?’, in Williams, P. and Chrisman, L., (eds), Colonial Discourse and Post –Colonial Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
28.  The Guyana Chronicle: ‘Talking about Education‘ Black and White.
29.  Tiffin C. and Lawson, A, (Eds) “Introduction Describing Empire ¾ Post- Colonialism and Sexuality,” (London: Routledge.1994).




1 comment:

  1. Wow! What a splendid work it is! I never heard of Shiva Naipaul and his tremendous contribution to literary world. I read V. S. Naipaul's works but I never knew that Shiva is brothe V. S. I will start reading Shiva... Great!

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