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Being enamored of Laurie R. King's writing, I snapped up her latest paperback* as soon as I learned it was available. This was another in the Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes series; it takes place primarily in India, and in it there are many references to "Kim", which I had never read. (Aside: she {the author} made me smile one time when Russell says to Holmes that she had thought Kim was fictional; he replies that Kim--whom he had met--was "as real as I am".)
Anyway, my interest was piqued enough that I took Ms. King's suggestion, and got "Kim" out of the library. I was glad that I had read the other book first; otherwise I wouldn't have gotten some of the references in "Kim", such as using the word tank for what the Russell character said we would call a pond, and the Ethnological Survey. Anyway, there were several terms in there that puzzled me, and if anyone can enlighten me on any of them, I would appreciate it. First, though, a word that Ms. King used: caparisoned. The character referred to both a camel and an elephant as being caparisoned...? Sounded almost like it could be a weird verbed form of carapace.
Okay, Kipling's words/terms:
Mavericks: some sort of Irish regiment; and
Mulligan guards, which was in a song sung by the Mavericks;
ne varietur--what Kim's father had called some sort of paper because those were the words written below his signature;
dewas--some kind of art work
Isabella-coloured clothes
contemning--our old friend
soft, black wideawake hat--worn by a Church of England chaplain
lusus naturoe--"Are there many more like you in India?" said Father Victor, "or are you by way o' being a lusus naturoe?" (p. 103)
hairpins of jade, ivory, and plasma
wry-necked (Haven't we had this one before, too?) "It was a wry-necked matter of unauthorised and incendiary correspondence..." (p. 177)
serai--this was in both books; also caravanserai.
I enjoyed reading about the Grand Trunk Road, which I had not heard of before; and I just loved this, of Kipling's:
"barracks...whose ceiling gave back his lonely footfall."
*I strongly prefer paperbacks because they take up far less shelf/bedstead space than hardbacks.
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I loved Kim. Sure, Kipling was an imperialist, but he was also someone who loved India, (until the age of 6, Urdu (the language taught at my father's school) was his first language), and his India, the NorthWest Provinces, is the India of my father and his family, and Kipling's description of an Anglo-Indian rascal growing up in boarding school are very similar to stories my father tells of his own boarding school.
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"Ten thousand scimitars flash in the sunlight, and thrice ten thousand dancing-girls strew flowers. Then, follow white elephants caparisoned in countless gorgeous colours, and infinite in number and attendants."
~Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, chap. 1.
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Carpal Tunnel
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caparisoned -- (adj. describing beasts of burden) decorated with lots of fancy saddle-cloths and saddles and other bits and pieces.
Ne varietur is Latin for "let it not be altered". I don't know if that helps or not.
Dewas -- dewa is the Indonesian for god (in polytheistic religion), probably from Sanskrit. I don't know if that helps or not. I believe Dewas is also a place name.
wideawake hat -- I've seen this before but I don't know exactly what it is. At a guess, a hat with a turned up brim so you can't use it to shade your eyes while you have a doze?
Lusus naturoe -- I suspect this is a misprint for the Latin lusus naturae (or it represents Father Victor's pronunciation, or a dig at him being uneducated or trying to appear more educated than he in fact is, I don't know I haven't read the book), which would mean a game of nature, usually anglicised as a sport of nature, meaning one of a kind.
wry-necked -- complicated, not straightforward, probably deliberately so.
caravanserai, serai -- inn. Whether a caravanserai would be bigger than a serai (to cope with caravans?) I don't know.
Bingley
Bingley
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Nothing particular beyond Bingley's excellent treatise, but tank was commonly used in northern Arizona when I was there in the '70s, but it generally referred to a man made pond, possibly because there weren't many that weren't man made other than seasonal ponds.
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I, too, love Kipling, although he is an imperialist and says some (now) quite shocking things about non-English people. He is a wonderful writer with a brilliant command of English, of dialect and of grammar - all essentials if your writing is not to get in the way of the story. And a good storyteller, to boot. Not to mention the poetry.
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Nice article, thanks. I especially liked this phrase, truer now than then, I suspect:
"We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are ‘enlightened’ all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our ‘enlightenment’, demands that the robbery shall continue."
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Thanks, everybody. Something else puzzled me, too: when Kim first meets the lama, he is surprised that the lama tells the truth to a stranger. And in another part, one of his mentors "oils his tongue for the road" as they're getting ready to leave. Are/were there really cultures where not being truthful to strangers is routine? Why on earth would anybody do that? (I don't mean when, for instance, you're accosted in a dark alley and tell the person you have no money when you do; I mean as a matter of course.)
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Kipling used phrases that stun us with their ethnic superiorism:
"The White Man's Burden"
"Lesser breeds without the Law"
"half-devil and half-child"
Kipling simply stated explicitly what the modern affluent nations of the world accept implicitly ... but dare not say aloud.
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