| NAME: | Unknown |
| SPECIES: | Wolves |
| DATE: | 1920 |
| LOCATION: | India |
| SITUATION: | Stolen or abandoned children in Indian forests |
| WHO WAS SAVED: | Amala and Kamala, two young girls |
| LEGACY: | Either the most-amazing wolf-child story ever or the most-famous animal-rescue hoax |
In nineteenth-century India, stories of wolf-children were legion. Hundreds, if not thousands, of infants and children were reported stolen from rural villages by wolves every year. If the stories were to be believed, most were dragged into the forests and eaten, never to be seen again. However, some were actually cared for and protected by the wolves. When rescued, these wolf-raised children acted like wolves, exhibiting an incredibly similar collection of traits.
Westerners dismissed these tales of wolf-children as nothing but folklore or primitive superstition. At best, they were supernatural explanations for the unsettling behavior of children suffering from autism or other developmental disabilities.
Then, in the 1920s, the story emerged of an Indian Christian missionary, Reverend J. A. L. Singh, who had supposedly found two such wolf-children living in a wolves’ den. Since then, scientists and journalists have skeptically poked and prodded the missionary’s tale. Was Reverend Singh telling the truth, or was his story just a massive hoax?
Even today, people still argue the evidence, and so this story is as much about the credibility of Reverend Singh as it is about whether wolves actually raised these two abandoned children.
THE GHOSTS OF GODAMURI
Here is the story as Reverend Singh told it, and largely as he recorded it in his diary, which was first published, with extensive expert commentary, in 1942:
In 1920, during one of his missionary trips through rural India to convert heathen tribes, Reverend Singh heard a story of “ghosts” running with a wolf pack near a forest village, Godamuri. Village leaders pleaded with Singh to exorcise or kill the demons, and with much reluctance, he finally agreed to investigate.
The ghosts had been seen sporadically in the past, but during the previous four months, they had appeared much more frequently and closer to the village. Frightened locals brought Singh to the place where the pack lived: An abandoned, weathered termite mound, perhaps twelve feet high, in which several groomed, narrow openings indicated tunnels.
On two visits there, Singh saw nothing and wrote in his diary, “I thought it was all false.” But he suspected the spirit beasts might actually be some new species that he could kill as a hunting trophy, so he had locals build a shooting platform above the termite mound.
On October 9, 1920, Singh and four other men waited on the platform at dusk. This time, in the fading light, three wolves and two cubs were seen exiting the mound, one at a time. Then, Singh wrote, “close after the cubs came the ghost—a hideous-looking being.” Quickly, “there came another awful creature exactly like the first, but smaller. . . . I at once came to the conclusion that these were human beings.”
Two men raised their rifles to shoot, but Singh stopped them. The next day, the men returned and witnessed the same scene, which convinced everyone but the superstitious villagers that the “ghosts” were really children. For Reverend Singh, he felt it was his Christian duty to save them and restore them to human society.
RESCUING THE CHILDREN
A week later, Reverend Singh returned with a group of men to capture the children. Since the Godamuri villagers were too afraid, Singh recruited people from a distant village who hadn’t already heard of the ghosts.
More than fifty years afterward, Lasa Marandi—a man who claimed to help Reverend Singh that day—said, “Some of the older men were saying they would rather stand unarmed against the charge of a tiger than come face-to-face with the ghosts . . . but we also felt [they] would succeed in killing the ghosts with their guns and rid the place of them once and for all.”
A group of diggers began excavating the mound, protected by bowmen and others with guns. Soon, two wolves scooted from tunnel openings and ran away. Then, a third wolf, the she-wolf, emerged. She attacked the diggers, who scattered, and then she raced side-to-side, “growling furiously and pawing the ground,” Singh wrote.
When she attacked the diggers a second time, the bowmen shot her dead. After that, the digging proceeded easily, and soon the structure collapsed, revealing a sunken, central cave. Singh wrote, “The two cubs and the other two hideous beings were there in one corner, all four clutching together in a monkey-ball.”
After a great deal of wrangling, the men managed to separate the cubs from the children and hold them in separate sacks.
Before leaving, Singh examined the den. To his surprise, he wrote, “the place was so neat that not even a piece of bone was visible anywhere, much less any evidence of their droppings and other uncleanliness.”
Charles Maclean, in his 1975 book The Wolf Children, captured this ironic dilemma, which dogs Singh’s story to this day: “They were looking at the only material evidence of the children’s life among the wolves, an empty hollow that gave away no secrets.”
AMALA AND KAMALA
Reverend Singh brought the two children back to his orphanage in the town of Midnapore, where he optimistically expected to rehabilitate them. He decided that their identity as wolf-children must be kept hidden, or else their lives, and his own, would descend into that of circus sideshow freaks and their keeper.
They were two apparently unrelated girls. At first, Singh put their ages at eight and one and a half, but at other times described them as nearer to six and three. Singh’s wife named the older girl Kamala (or “lotus”) and the younger Amala, the name of a yellow flower.
Singh could only speculate as to how they had come to be with the wolves. He and others made inquiries about whether anyone knew of any abandoned or stolen girls, but no one came forth. Considering the ages of the girls, Singh was stunned to consider that the she-wolf must have decided to foster human infants twice.
The girls had clearly been with the wolves a long time, for their wild, inhuman behavior was so ingrained that it was nearly impossible to alter. Their actions also fit the quintessential profile of feral children:
They reacted violently to being touched or to being bathed. They moved only on all fours, refusing to stand, and their knees, elbows, and heels of their hands were thickly calloused. Their bodies were covered in scratches and scars. They did not speak; they only uttered rare guttural vocalizations or howled at night. They wouldn’t eat cooked food, only raw meat, and they lapped milk or water from bowls. Most of all, their blank expressions were seemingly devoid of emotion, and they avoided all social contact, either with the Singhs or the other orphanage children.
THE FERAL CHILD: REAL AND ROMANTICIZED
Stories of children raised by wild animals have always populated world cultures. They are sprinkled throughout Greek and Roman mythology. For instance, Romulus and Remus, the founders of ancient Rome, were famously suckled by a she-wolf.
In medieval folklore, endangered children were continually being rescued by wild and domestic creatures, and the ubiquitous trope of wolf-children in nineteenth-century India inspired Rudyard Kipling to create Mowgli in The Jungle Book—which in turn inspired Edgar Rice Burroughs to create Tarzan (see page 103).
What’s intriguing is that real cases of feral children exist (see page 200). Interspecies suckling does happen; even humans have been known to do it with other animals.
And yet, feral-child myths typically turn reality on its head. The central tragedy of abandonment is transformed into a necessary right of passage that molds the child into a hero now fit to rule. This message contains a certain guilty hopefulness, a bit of cultural wish-fulfillment: That nature is more merciful than we are, and wild compassion will redeem our civilized cruelty, which leads us to neglect our children in the first place.
Most often, real feral children have been horrifically isolated, perhaps because they showed developmental problems. They sometimes come to mimic animal behaviors even when no animal ever cared for them. Scientists have long been fascinated by what these unsocialized, wild children tell us about human nature, but the sad truth is that real feral children recover haltingly and slowly, if ever, from their traumatic beginnings.
Metaphorically, feral-child stories express a desire to balance an inner duality, a healthy merging of our wild and civilized natures. In reality, the wild is a crippling place for a solitary human infant to grow up.
Reverend Singh also insisted on another attribute: their eyes in the dark occasionally exhibited a blue glare. The girls’ senses were preternaturally acute, and Singh claimed this included night vision signaled by glowing animal eyes.
THE LIES AND CONTRADICTIONS OF REVEREND SINGH
The story of Amala and Kamala became famous precisely because it was the first to include an eyewitness of feral children in the company of wolves. As such, its authenticity turns on whether you believe the main witness, Reverend Singh. Many commentators do not, and with good reason: His story is full of contradictions and flatly unbelievable details, like the glowing eyes.
One person who believed that Singh’s story was “true, though perhaps not the whole truth,” was Charles Maclean. “Unfortunately,” Maclean wrote, “Singh’s tendency to exaggerate is common to all his writings. His letters and reports, written in the convoluted and extravagant style of Indian English, are full of hyperbole and . . . histrionic inflation.”
Further, Singh himself told multiple versions of the story. Sometimes he said the children were merely abandoned and neglected and he did not mention the wolves; in other versions, the already-rescued children were brought to him by villagers, who then told him the wolf story. Perhaps, as Maclean believed, these were false accounts meant to protect the children, and Singh’s own reputation, from infamy. Supporting Singh, Maclean later found corroborating eyewitnesses, like Lasa Marandi.
Or perhaps the diary and the story it tells are an elaborate, deliberate hoax that Singh concocted after the children died to gain fame and perhaps profit. This is what French surgeon Serge Aroles concluded in his 2007 book L’Enigme des Enfants-Loup (“Enigma of the Wolf-Children”).
In other words, here is another instance where distinguishing reality from folklore becomes a tricky business. Legends of wolf-children may have inspired Singh, and then encouraged others to believe him, or perhaps those fantastical legends are, on rare occasions like this one, true.
Sadly, the two people who could have definitively solved this mystery did not live long. Amala died in 1921, and Kamala died in 1929 (both of kidney problems). By that time, after eight years in the orphanage, Kamala could speak a few words, stand properly, and behave in a friendly manner, free of any obvious mental handicaps.
But she remained mute on the topic of her alleged canid upbringing.