ABSTRACT
In “Kipling’s ‘vernacular’: what he knew of it—and what he made of it”, Harish Trivedi argues that Kim “needs to be appreciated and acclaimed as one of the supreme examples of radical multilingual transactions in the whole of English literature”. Kipling’s representation of multilingual India and his invention of an imagined idiom for his Indian characters is one of the major pleasures of Kim because it creates the impression that an English-speaking reader has access to another language and culture. Kipling’s invented idiom has been the subject of detailed exposition; as his distinctive use of single, italicised Hindi, Urdu, and Hindustani words has received less sustained attention and has sometimes been viewed by critics as haphazard or superficial. In Kim, “vernacular” words are woven into English sentences in a way which makes them comparatively easy to assimilate while at the same time creating an impression of gaps between languages and problems with translation.
