The Real Boy Raised By Wolves

The Jungle Book is one of the best-loved children’s stories ever written: Rudyard Kipling’s tale of Mowgli, the “man-cub” raised by a devoted wolf pack, taught wisdom by a kindly bear and a noble panther, growing into a clever, confident boy who becomes master of the jungle. It is a story of belonging, adventure and triumph. And the real case widely believed to have helped inspire it is one of the most heartbreaking inversions in all of literature. Because a boy really was found living among wolves in the jungles of India, and what actually happens to such a child is the opposite of a fairy tale.

To understand it, you have to go to the Bulandshahr district of northern India, in what is now Uttar Pradesh, in February 1867. This was the India of the British Raj, a land where, remarkably, reports of “wolf children” were not unheard of. Colonial accounts told of children supposedly discovered living with wild animals across the subcontinent. On one day that February, a group of hunters moving through the jungle tracked a wolf to the mouth of a cave. When they investigated, they found something that stopped them cold. Inside the den, among the wolves, was a human child: a boy of perhaps six, moving on all fours, utterly at home among the animals. To get him out, the hunters are said to have smoked the wolves from the cave, killing one of the adult animals in the process. Then they seized the terrified, struggling boy and carried him back to what the British called civilisation.

They took him to the Sikandra Mission Orphanage, near Agra, the city of the Taj Mahal, where Christian missionaries took him in. Because he arrived on a Saturday, and had no name, no language and no past that anyone could discover, they named him for the day: Dina Sanichar, “Sanichar” meaning Saturday. And then they began the long, doomed attempt to turn a wolf-child into a human boy.

The Horror

The horror of Dina Sanichar’s story is not blood or violence. It is something quieter and, in its way, far sadder: the discovery that a child raised outside human society in his earliest years may never be able to truly enter it, no matter how long he lives among people. When Sanichar arrived, he was human only in body. He could not walk upright, moving instead on all fours like the wolves he had lived with. He could not speak, and understood no language whatsoever; human words meant nothing to him. He refused cooked food, eating only raw meat, and would take a bone and gnaw it to sharpen his teeth, as an animal does. He communicated only in grunts, growls and howls. In every way that had been shaped in him during those first crucial years, he was a wolf in a boy’s body. The missionaries worked with him for years, and they were not entirely without success, though the successes only make the story sadder. Slowly, over a long time, Sanichar learned to stand and walk upright. He learned to wear clothes. He learned to understand some of what was said to him, to perform simple tasks, and eventually to eat prepared food, though he reportedly always preferred meat. But the deepest thing, the human thing, never came. Across nearly three decades living among people, cared for and taught every day, Dina Sanichar never learned to speak. Not a single word in his whole life. The window in early childhood in which a human brain acquires language had closed, and no amount of care could reopen it. He remained, by the accounts of those who knew him, restless and ill at ease among humans, never belonging, forever caught on the dividing line between two worlds and at home in neither. The one human habit he fully embraced, tragically, was a vice: he learned to smoke, and became a heavy, lifelong smoker.

The Modern Relic

That smoking, some believe, contributed to his end. Dina Sanichar developed tuberculosis, and in 1895 he died, still at the orphanage, still unable to speak, a man in his mid-thirties who had spent the great majority of his life among humans and never once been able to become one of them. He was, from beginning to end, a stranger in the human world.

The relic is the story’s astonishing literary shadow, and a photograph that survives. Just one year before Sanichar died, in 1894, Rudyard Kipling published The Jungle Book, with its wolf-raised boy hero, Mowgli. Kipling had worked as a journalist in India in the 1880s, and the country was full of “wolf-child” stories in exactly that period; his own father, John Lockwood Kipling, wrote about Indian wolf-child cases in a book of his own. Kipling never confirmed that Mowgli was based on Sanichar, or on any single real child, but Sanichar is widely regarded as one of the real-life inspirations behind the world’s most famous jungle boy. It is an almost unbearable contrast: at the very moment the world was falling in love with the magical, triumphant fantasy of Mowgli, the real wolf-boy was ending his short, silent life in an orphanage in Agra. And the relic of him is a single haunting photograph, taken sometime between 1889 and 1894, that survives to this day: the so-called real Mowgli, dressed in human clothes, staring into the camera with a face that seems to belong to neither the jungle he was taken from nor the human world he was never able to join. The truest memorial to Dina Sanichar is the gap between that image and the smiling cartoon, the distance between the story we tell children about being raised by wolves, and the heartbreaking thing that really happens.

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