I tried reading Kim recently and was immediately put off by the seemingly archaic dialogue. The book is set at the turn of the 20th century in India, and there is dialogue such as:
Lama: “Nay, if it please thee to forget—the one thing only that thou hast not told me. Surely thou must know? …”
Curator: "I am bound,” said the Curator. “But whither goest thou?”
I read several pages and this kind of dialog seemed prevalent, including by Kim, the orphan boy protagonist. I spot checked ahead in the book and saw more instances of this. To be clear, not all the dialogue was like this, but there was enough to put me off the book, so I set it aside.
It’s not the dialogue itself, it is that it is anachronistic in this setting. I read Ivanhoe recently and this style of dialog was used throughout the book and I thought nothing of it.
Any other readers of Kim out there who care to comment on this?
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“Thou” is familiar, “you” is formal. It’s a distinction English used to have, but no longer does.
When you hear a character use “thou”, what is their relationship between them and the person they’re speaking to?
Well, it’s more than just the use of “thou/thee”, which are just prominent examples in a style that seems to me anachronistic for the time period of the book. Here’s a longer sample
“To what, child?” said the lama.
“God knows, but so my father told me. I heard thy talk in the Wonder House of all those new strange places in the Hills, and if one so old and so little—so used to truth-telling—may go out for the small matter of a river, it seemed to me that I too must go a-travelling. If it is our fate to find those things we shall find them—thou, thy River; and I, my Bull, and the Strong Pillars and some other matters that I forget.”But maybe this fomral/informal distinction proposed with respect to “thou/thee” is extended to the rest of the dialogue.
Fc siza
It was published in 1900-1901. So.
Did you read past the title? “Thee” and “thou” were archaic even in 1900, as OP said.
People write like that, or try to, now. Why wouldn’t they attempt to then? We’ve always told stories from our past.
There’s nothing strange about using archaic language in an archaic story. But Kim was set and published a solid century after thee/thou had fallen completely out of favor. OP wanted to know why Kipling used archaic language in a story that was not set in that archaic period.
That’s a reasonable question, and it did have a reasonable answer, as explored in the rest of the thread. But it’s not just “it uses old language because it’s old.”
I’m saying that this style of speech was archaic by time of its writing and publication. It was not appropriate to time and place in England for sure. It may have been in India, but I doubt it.
It’s been a while since I read the book but isn’t it set during the great game? Which runs pretty much the entire 19nth century. I know it was published at the turn of the 20th but unless he mentioned dates I can’t remember it could have been set much earlier.
Yes it is. Per the Wikipedia article: “It is set after the Second Afghan War (which ended in 1881), but before the Third (fought in 1919), probably in the period 1893 to 1898”
I think it denotes a difference between formal and informal terms of address. I haven’t read the book, but I have read Patrick O’Brian’s HMS Surprise, which has several Indian characters do the same thing when they’re meant to be speaking Hindi.