On a cold windy morning in January, 1954, a quivering bundle of rags in a waiting room at the Lucknow railway station attracted the attention of passers-by who opened it to be greeted by a nine-year-old boy, crawling out on all fours. The boy could not speak and was running a high temperature.
At the Balrampur Hospital in Lucknow the doctors struggled with him, giving mouth feeding and vitamin injections. The boy, who was named Rama, behaved like a wild animal, had two sets of teeth, ejected the milk that was poured into his mouth, howled like a wolf in anger and bit all those within reach. But he stretched out his hands when raw meat was brought to his bedside.
He would not eat cooked food and became ill when raw meat was stopped. He lapped up milk from a plate like a dog and jumped joyously when an Alsatian was brought to him. He played with the dog as if it were an old friend. In a few days, the boy started showing an improvement in health.
Although he was not recovered from a wolf’s den, a close study of Ramu’s behaviour pattern led the doctors to believe that he was reared by wolves; and there were numerous scars on his body such as might have resulted from playful fights with wolf cubs.
Stories of children being carried away by wolves and reared by them are numerous, in India as well as abroad. There is the 16th –century German legend of a three-year-old boy who was recovered from wolves. But he would always yearn to be back with the pack, which gave him the choicest pieces of meat. Then there is the 18th-century tale of Hungarian hunters finding a full-grown wild young woman, healthy and strong. She was brought back to civilisation but never gave up the habit of eating raw meat, bark and roots.
In Midnapore, Bengal, a missionary, who went to preach to the jungle tribes in 1920, tried to drive out a pack of wolves from a terrorised village and found two girls among the animals. The beasts resisted the capture of the girls and had to be killed. Named Amala and Kamala, the girls were kept in an orphanage, Amala soon died, but Kamala was humanised and taught to walk on two feet, speak a little and even run small errands. But she, too, died after nine years among human beings, on developing a strange metabolic disease as a result of the strain of belatedly trying to become civilised.
Leave a Reply