Dina Sanichar: The Sad Story Of The Wild Boy Who Inspired The Jungle Book
He grew by wolves in the jungle of Uttar Pradesh in India until hunters found him in 1867 and took him to an orphanage.
What is a wolf child?
Is it possible for humans and wolves to coexist?
Did he manage to adapt to the civilized world?
Dina Sanichar was raised by wolves and spent the first years of his life believing he was one of them.
When hunters found him lying in a cave, they took him to a nearby orphanage.
There, missionaries tried to teach him the things he had never learned, starting with the basics: walking and talking.
Still, the gulf between human behaviour and animal instinct proved too wide for Sanichar to overcome.
Who was Dina?
The year was 1867.
Setting: Bulandshahr district, India.
According to local media reports, a group of hunters entered the jungle one night when they came upon a clearing.
Beyond was the entrance to a cave guarded by a lone wolf.
The hunters prepared to ambush their unsuspecting prey but stopped short once they realized this animal was not an animal.
It was a child no older than six years old.
It did not approach the men or answer their questions.
So as not to leave the boy in the unforgiving outskirts of the jungle, the hunters captured him and transferred him to the Sikandra Mission Orphanage in the city of Agra.
Since he had no name, the missionaries gave him one.
They named him Dina Sanichar, after the Hindi word for Saturday, the day he arrived.
Dina tries to adapt to the civilized world.
During his stay at the Sikandra Mission Orphanage, Sanichar received a second name: Wolf Boy.
The missionaries thought it suited him because they believed he grew by wild animals and had never experienced human contact.
According to testimonies, Sanichar's behaviour resembled that of an animal rather than a human.
He walked on all fours and had difficulty standing on two feet.
He ate only raw meat and chewed bones to sharpen his teeth.
"The ease with which they get along on four feet (hands and feet) is amazing," Erhardt Lewis, the orphanage superintendent, once wrote to a distant colleague.
"Before they eat or taste any food, they smell it, and when they don't like the smell, they throw it away."
From grunting and howling to smoking cigarettes
Communication with Sanichar needed to be improved for two reasons.
First, he spoke a different language than the missionaries who cared for him.
He growled or howled like a wolf whenever he wanted to express himself.
Secondly, he needed help understanding the signs too.
People who do not speak the same language can usually come close to understanding each other by simply pointing at various objects with their fingers.
But because wolves don't point (or have fingers, for that matter), this universal gesture probably didn't make sense to him.
While Sanichar eventually learned to understand the missionaries, he never learned to speak their language.
Perhaps it was because the sounds of human speech were too foreign to him.
However, the longer Sanichar stayed at the orphanage, the more he began to behave like a human.
According to missionaries, he learned to stand up and began to dress.
Some say he even acquired the most human trait of all: smoking cigarettes.
What is a feral child?
Dina and many others like him come into feral children.
Those infants have remained isolated from society for a prolonged during their childhood and adolescence.
They got abandoned in a wild environment and lost.
Or have been retained or confined during childhood or puberty.
These children present alterations in both behavioural and cognitive aspects.
They need to gain acquired knowledge and skills to coexist and participate in social life community.
There is variability in the cases observed.
Among wild children, three basic types:
Children who have lived alone for a long time, those who survived in a hostile environment being cared for by other animal species (as in the case of Dina Sanichar).
And infants who have been mistreated and confined for much of their lives.
Characteristics of feral children
One of the most evident symptoms is language's absence or poor development.
Although different authors have disagreed about whether human language is a learned ability or whether the necessary structures for it from birth
There is evidence of periods of learning there is an explosive development of some abilities, such as language.
These periods are called critical periods.
Regarding language, experts have pointed out that the critical period occurs between three and four years.
Thus, the child's abilities will not develop.
They hinder his evolution and make it difficult for him to adapt to the social environment.
Not only linguistic abilities would be affected, but also representative and relational.
And even the construction of personal identity.
Another of the deficiencies of these children is the need for socialization.
Because through social interaction, one learns and exchanges information with others.
It is possible to develop perspectives and ways of thinking and acting that enrich the personal repertoire and better adapt to the environment.
Due to their poor or null socialization, feral children cannot participate in society.
They act according to what they have learned throughout their lives in the habitat they have grown in.
What attitudes and skills make them capable of subsisting they have grown up in but do not apply to community life?
Another element common in most cases is the avoidance of human contact.
Both physically and emotionally, these children try to distance themselves as far as possible from their peers, making the treatment of the cases difficult in the early stages.
That explained that they had not had contact with human beings for a long time or that this contact had been aversive.
These children took against their will from the environment in which they have grown.
And even when they grew by animals, they may have seen their rescuer die at the hands of humans.
Other cases of wild children
Interestingly, Sanichar was not the only wolf child living at the Sikandra Mission orphanage at the time.
As Superintendent Lewis relates, he happened to two other boys and a girl who were also said to have been raised by wolves.
According to one geographer, the orphanage took in so many wolf children over the years that discovering another child in the jungle was no longer surprising.
In fact, over the last century, stories of children raised by wolves have surfaced throughout India.
In most cases, the missionaries who cared for the children were the only sources, so whether they were wild remains for debate.
Others hypothesize that the children may not have been growing by animals and were intellectually or physically disabled.
In that case, the stories may have been people jumping to conclusions about their behaviour.
The legacy of the wild children
While the details of Dina Sanichar's life story cannot verify, those of other feral children can.
Oxana Malaya, a Ukrainian born in the 1990s, grew up by stray dogs after her alcoholic parents left her outside when she was just a baby.
When she got up by social workers, she could not speak and moved on all fours.
After years of therapy, Oxana learned to speak Russian.
She now has a boyfriend and works on a farm taking care of animals.
Shamdeo, an Indian boy, was about four years old when they found him living with wolves in a forest in India.
As reported by the LA Times, "he had sharp teeth, long hooked nails, and calluses on his palms, elbows, and knees."
He also died young.
So did Sanichar, who was only 35 when his body succumbed to tuberculosis in 1895.
Although he spent most of his short life in the company of other people rather than the animals that supposedly raised him, he never fully adapted to life in the orphanage.
Be that as it may, true or embellished, the story of Dina Sanichar has a similar thread to Kipling's The Jungle Book.
The Jungle Book
The lack of adaptation and the confrontation between civilized society and wild nature took in The Jungle Book, a classic of universal literature.
The first Briton to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, the poet and writer Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), however, was born in Bombay and peppered his most famous work with references to the colonial society in which he grew up.
Thus, The Jungle Book is not only set in Seeonee (now Seoni), the heart of India.
But its popular characters are also natives of the subcontinent: from the stern Bagheera (bagh means panther in Hindi) to the tyrant Shere Khan (sher means tiger) and the affable Baloo (bear in the national language).
The book's protagonist is said to be inspired by the cases of wild children recorded at the end of the 19th century in India and whose dramatic stories outlined the social criticism behind the legend of Mowgli.
Four children have found in the open in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh between 1841 and 1895.
Seven of which were documented by General W. H. Sleeman in A Journey Through the Kingdom of Oude, 1948–50 (1858):
"Wolves are numerous at Sultanpoor, in the vicinity of the Gumtree River and its gorges; and a large number of children are brought thither from towns, villages, and fields."
According to the British general, all the captured minors had savage characteristics, such as a penchant for raw meat and "aggressive" attitudes for which they had to be tied up.
"There were evident signs, on knees and elbows, of having walked on all fours, and when asked to run, he ran so fast that no one could outrun him," he wrote of the first captured boy.
The British Empire's administration did not succeed in getting the children to adapt to society or to learn a single word after being raised by animals
— unlike later cases of infants abandoned when they could already speak, such as Marcos Pantoja, the wild child of Sierra Morena, found in 1953 after 12 years in the bush.
In Incommunicado and captivity, the Indian wolf children interacted only with those who had been their species until then.
"The next night, three wolves came, and four the next day, to play with him," Sleeman described of one of the wild children, who escaped within days.
Returned to the wild or killed soon after capture, only one survived decades among humans after spending his entire childhood in the jungle.
The perversion of more than 20 years of social imposition on Dina Sanichar is closely related to the legend of Kipling's Mowgli, who admitted in correspondence in 1895 to have drawn on several sources of inspiration, not just his imagination.
As in the true story, The Jungle Book shows the danger of the clash between two opposing worlds.
Although a confessed defender of British colonialism and branded by George Orwell as imperialist and morally insensitive, Kipling captured in a unique literary parable the struggle between two civilizations, the differences between classes and castes, and his lack of adaptation to an India that was always strange to him.
The version released this month by the Netflix platform and producer Netflix further underscores the culture clash that is very present in Kipling's original.
Taking a license, it baptizes the English soldier who takes in Mowgli, the name of John Lockwood, Kipling's real-life father and illustrator of the stories in The Jungle Book.
The Edelvives edition includes some drawings and offers a complete version of The Second Jungle Book, plus the author's poem Si and other stories.
Lessons from The Jungle Book
If something is exciting in The Jungle Book, it is the amount of wisdom it gathers and how in short stories, it creates stunning environments that explore, to the point of shame and pain, human nature.
The book appeared in 1894, and there would be a second volume.
Generally, current editions contain both volumes.
This second part contains stories from other parts of the world.
And with other characters that also have many teachings, metaphors, and beauty.
Because of the depth of the stories, it is somewhat "unfair" to give it the label of children's books, not because this is little or because children's literature lacks value or beauty.
But it falls short because, at any age, it will give material to reflect, get excited, and enjoy those wonders that literature provides.
Let's look at some of these teachings.
We are just another part of our planet.
The film explains how humans are just another species among the many that occupy the Earth.
It reminds us of the need to respect the environment and the other living beings that inhabit it.
Family is more than blood.
Little Mowgli arrived in the jungle under the protection of the panther Bagheera.
And he was adopted by the she-wolf Raksha, who raised him as a pack member.
Of course, the jungle animals know that he is human and that, in theory, this was a task that was not theirs to perform.
Nevertheless, they do it.
Without being a mother by blood or race, Raksha perfectly exemplifies what a happy upbringing should be like love, tenderness, and education.
All other variables are secondary.
Enjoy nature and be happy.
If there is something we should appreciate is the beauty and the resources that we give us.
That is a luxury of life, health, and joy that is calm and tranquillity.
Be faithful and honest in your friendship to the very end.
Another valuable lesson children learn from this story is the value of friendship.
There is nothing in this life than having friends, and if you enjoy their company in an environment as authentic as the jungle or nature, those bonds will be much stronger.
Few stories have been so inspiring to so many generations.
The values that emerge from them will continue to be valid throughout time.
Sources
https://grandesmedios.com
https://psicologiaymente.com
https://elpais.com
https://hipertextual.com
https://www.indiatimes.com
https://lamenteesmaravillosa.com
Thank you for reading!
Rocio Becerra