BOOKS

Looking very carefully

Colin Welch

AN UNFINISHED JOURNEY by Shiva Naipaul

Hamish Hamilton, £9.95

In peace sons bury their fathers; in war fathers bury their sons. But peace too is full of tragic anomalies. It was Douglas Stuart's sad fate in 1985 to mourn his son-in-law, Shiva Naipaul, aged only 40, a writer peculiarly dear to Spectator readers and husband of Jenny, a lady peculiarly dear to Spectator writers.

And it is now Mr Stuart's task to introduce with pride and perception Shi- va's last writings. Formerly of the BBC, he was drawn to Shiva by 'a shared love of words, puns, jokes and ideas', as also by Shiva's astonishing intellectual growth. 'The paradox was', Mr Stuart reports, 'that, while his reading and comprehension were so rapid, his own writing was slow.' Paradox or no, I'm sure that that slowness was very evident to thoughtful Spectator readers, who must know that prose so crammed with observation and reflection, with humour and feeling, with phrasing so felicitous, concise and illuminating, is not achieved without the author being ready, as Shiva was, to spend 'a whole morning over a sentence and then reject it in the afternoon'.

Mr Stuart justly refers to the 'removal of misconceptions' as the central aim of all Shiva's writings. He further recalls 'his hatred of humbug' and 'his horror of every kind of racism'. The whole of this last book, so poignantly titled, can be discussed in terms of this aim and these detestations. They powerfully link together what looks like a ragbag — essays about Australia, about his brother V. S. Naipaul, about 'the illusion of the Third World', about Mrs Gandhi's death and the Nehrus, and the unfinished journey itself, a long frag- ment about Sri Lanka from a book which was to have been about Australia. The book never got there, though Shiva did. These pages contain hors d' oeuvres; the main dish will never be served.

This aim, these detestations are also themselves powerfully linked together. They inter-react on each other, correct each other. Among the misconceptions Shiva strove to remove are misconceptions about race and racism. Among the sorts of humbug he hated was the humbug of anti-racism, as also of that pseudo-benign inverted racism which indiscriminately and patronisingly showers charity, compassion and privileges, often ill-chosen and in- appropriate, on the poor. oppressed and coloured of this world, with the risk of unintentionally demeaning them.

As for racism, well, it is Mr Stuart's word, not mine: but it would be petty for any of us to pretend that we don't know perfectly well what he means by it. Shiva was certainly most keenly aware of race. An Indian, born in Trinidad, educated at Oxford (in classical Chinese!), travelling ceaselessly 'in search of his identity', a foreigner everywhere, he would be, wouldn't he? Is it also fair to say that he found racism everywhere? Oh no: I cer- tainly don't mean that he was the sort of idiotic racial fanatic who couldn't see two white friends chatting innocently in a pub, while a black or Indian unknown to them drinks alone, without fulminating about racism. On the contrary, detest it as he may, he treats racism with unfailing sym- pathy and tact, as a nigh-universal fact of life, common among people of every col- our, seeming to them a necessity without which they would fall to bits or dissolve into nothingness.

'Up here', confided a thonged, singlet- ted Australian youth Shiva met in Towns- ville, 'we are all racists'. 'Rob that man of his racism', Shiva comments, 'and you rob him of everything. It would be an act of great cruelty. Take away his prejudice and you end up with the prototype of the crazed castaway — an Antipodean Ben Gunn, driven mad by the twin tyrannies of anonymity and nothingness.' A respect- able Chinese man, of family long settled in Australia, was abused by an Australian woman as a 'slope head'. Shiva muses, more in sorrow than in anger: 'for whom should we feel the greater sadness, the abused or the abuser?'

In a similarly all-comprehending vein, he notes of India that 'communalism', with all its complex and ineradicable divisions and distinctions, 'while articulating Indian di- versity, also expresses the unity of In- dia. . . Those who would abolish "com- munalism" by waving the magic wand of class war and revolution' (or, like the Nehrus, the magic wand of secularism) 'are, in effect, asking India to abolish itself.' Such insights are akin to those of the great Nirad Chaudhuri, who thought that India, by reason of her caste system and racial prejudices, was uniquely fitted to understand and sympathise with South Africa. Shiva, as we know well, was appalled by the sufferings and indignities of the Indian untouchables (see, for exam- ple, the Spectator of 1 December 1982), as of other oppressed races. But indignation did not blind him to whatever value or dire necessity might reside in the systems which oppressed them.

Barry Mackenzie, anathema to culti- vated, selfconscious Australians, Shiva actually finds funny, even endearing in his casual racism, his unreadiness for nearly everything, 'including the promised land of the multi-cultural state'. But Shiva is not so amused as to feel no distaste for the Australian Ocker, 'derelict descendant of a denuded amnesiac race that had hunted down the Aboriginal for sport. . . and, in verdant Tasmania, stooped to genocide.' I do not think that the irony of a former Australian Prime Minister shamelessly lec- turing the South Africans about their sins would have been lost on Shiva. He would have sniffed humbug. It is also notable that he sees Africa as 'a show-case of despair', 'from the desert shores of the Mediterra- nean to the jungly banks of the Limpopo'. Was it by accident that he excluded South Africa? Modish humbug finds despair only south of the Limpopo, never north of it.

Shiva is justly disgusted by the brandy- and-water bonhomie with which Anthony Trollope consigned to extinction the Au- stralian Aboriginal, as being impervious to improving influences, condemned by his own degradation — 'without unnecessary suffering', of course. Yet Shiva is hardly less disgusted by Australia's belated and ridiculous attempts to make amends. Still the Abo is not treated as an equal Austra- lian citizen. On the contrary, his different- ness is still emphasised by a corrupting benevolence which guiltily showers him as 'an ecological saint, obdurate freedom fighter, mystical dandy', which in effect perversely honours and preserves his pathetically primitive 'culture' and, with cruel good intent, officiously strives to imprison him in it. In all this Shiva recog- nised aspects of the racist humbug he hated.

Another aspect is revealed by his dis- taste for the concept of 'Blackness'. With acute misgivings he noted the proposed centre in London for the Blacks Arts — not, he hastens to assure us, to be con- founded with satanism and sorcery.

With support from the Greater London Council, Blackness threatens to engulf the life of the mind and the imagination. It is now fashionably radical to inform immig- rants from India and Pakistan and Cyprus that they too, for the sake of solidarity, must simplify themselves into Blackness. This travesty unites the far Left and the far Right. In the name of the Third World we madden ourselves with untruth.

Are we in the presence here of a lingering racism in Shiva himself, which is Offended by attempts to force him into Blackness? We are certainly in the pre- sence of a wider dislike of Shiva's: a fastidious distaste for our casually con- temptuous habit of lumping together, in, say, 'the Third World', people who have nothing whatever in common. He adapts Toistoy; each unhappy society, like each unhappy family, is unhappy in its own way. 'Blandly to subsume, say, Ethiopia, India and Brazil under the one banner of the Third World is as absurd and as denigrat- ing as the old assertion that the Chinese look alike. People only look alike when you can't be bothered to look at them too closely.' Wherever he went Shiva looked at peo- ple very closely indeed. They appeared to him, as through his eyes to us, in all their prodigiously rich diversity and individual- ity as also in all their infinitely varied groupings, which reveal themselves only to close inspection by a trained and sym- pathetic observer. Much of what he saw was richly comic, much horrifying, in Sri Lanka both. Richly absurd is his character- isation of 'the Goonetileke involved in development studies' who, in parting, ad- jured him: 'You must learn to look at what is positive', and not at 'these marginal topics'. 'The only difficulty', said Shiva, is that blood is such a bright red. It stands out. It has a way of forcing itself on the attention.' But blood, the hideous murders of Tamil women and children — these were among the 'marginal topics' Shiva was advised, without the slightest success, to ignore.

His death was grievous. Only those can have rejoiced who trade in humbug, mis- conceptions, racism and its obverse dou- ble. They had indeed lost a doughty enemy.