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?
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.”