Wolf Girls of Midnapore

Seems like I mixed up Victor, the Wild Boy
from Aveyron with the Wolf Girls of Midnapore

(I am sure philsopher Thomas Hobbes would have
been interested in the Wolf Girls after his
describing human societies as packs of wolves)

In 1920 Reverend Joseph Singh, a missionary
in Northern India, hauled out two girls, aged
about three and five, from a wolf’s den. They
had matted hair on their heads and a hunched
four legged gait. Singh called the elder Kamala
and the younger Amala. They had no trace of
humanness in how they acted and thought, as
if they had the minds of wolves. They tore off
clothes put on them and would only eat raw meat.
They slept curled up together in a tight ball and
growled and twitched in their sleep. They woke after
the moon rose and howled to be let free again. They
had spent so long on all fours that their tendons and
joints had shortened so it was impossible to straighten
their legs and walk upright. They never smiled or showed
interest in human company showing only the emotion
of fear. Even their senses had become wolf-like. Their
eyes were supernaturally sharp at night and glowed in
the dark.

They could smell a lump of meat right across the orphanage's
three acre yard. Their hearing was sharp, but the voice
of humans seemed strangely inaudible to their ears.
Singh taught Kamala to walk a little and she was housetrained
within a couple of years. After several years, her vocabulary
only contained about 40 words. A normal two-year-old child picks
up 40 new words in a single week. Kamala's words were only
partly-formed and her grammar stilted.

At the age of 16, after nine years at the orphanage
Kamala had the mind of a three and a half year old,
demonstrating how mentally naked humans are when
born, how much we rely on society to shape us. Human
culture operates on the mind as "a large scale moulding
matrix, a gigantic conditioning apparatus" without which
we would remain at the level of animals.

http://www.feralchildren.com/en/showchild.php?ch=kamala

Wolf Children and the Bifold Mind
An extract from a chapter of The
Myth of Irrationality, by John McCrone
Copyright © 1993 John McCrone
*