On October 22, 1926, the New York Times ran a memorable headline on the bottom of the front page: "2 Little Wolf Girls in "Den" With Wolf Cubs; Rescued, 1 Dies; 1 is Humanized Slowly." According to the story, which was based on a report in London's Westminster Gazette, two "wolf girls" had been found living in a wolf's den in a remote part of Bengal (then a part of India but now divided between India and Bangladesh).
The girls had been found by the Reverend Singh of Midnapore after hearing rumours from local villagers about "demons" being in the jungle. The girls, aged two and eight, were described by Singh as "exceedingly fierce, running on all fours, uttering guttural barks and living like wolves." While the younger girl died shortly after being rescued, the older girl was given the name, "Kamala" and was raised at the orphanage. Kamala was described as exhibiting "savage ways" including eating with her mouth in a dish and tearing off her clothes even after they had been "sewn on her." While she eventually learned a few words, Singh said that she was still "weak mentally and neither cries or laughs." She also avoided the other children in the orphanage and preferred to remain with the dogs.
When Kamala's story finally received international attention, many remained convinced that the "wolf girl" was a hoax. Members of one "well-known London club" even got into a fistfight over the controversy and Professor Julian Huxley at King's College in London suggested that Kamala's case was "just feasible." Still, it took a more impartial report by a bishop visiting Singh's orphanage to get better information about her. According to Bishop Pakenham-Walsh, unwanted female children in that part of India were often left exposed and a she-wolf had apparently "adopted" one of thee infants to raise as her own cub. For whatever reason, the wolf apparently repeated the experience six years later when a second girl was adopted as well.
In his account, the bishop described Kamala as "of normal size. and there is nothing peculiar about her except that she sits animal-like and does nothing for hours together. Her face has a vacant appearance, but when she says one of the thirty words she has learned . . . she smiles sweetly and has a pleasing face." Press reports compared the surviving girl as being similar to Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book character, Mowgli. Questions were also raised about whether she could ever be socialized. While there have been previous account of feral children being returned to civilization, including the famous Victor of Aveyron, none of them had ever been successfully taught language.
To complicate the question further, it soon turned out that the two girls had been rescued years earlier in 1920. The Reverend Singh and his wife had apparently kept Kamala's origins a secret for six years out of fear of how she would be affected by the publicity her story would bring. As Singh himself would later state, "if the rescue story became public, it would be difficult for us to settle them in their life by marriage, when they attained that age." He and his wife also feared that publicity"would lead to innumerable visits and queries, which would be a great drain on our time." The only reason the story reached the newspapers at all was that a letter by the bishop fell into the wrong hands.
What this meant was that much of the evidence relating to the time the two girls spent in the wild had been lost by the time the case began to attract serious scientific scrutiny. As it was, Kamala's health began declining (possibly due to the relentless media exposure) and she died in 1929, just three years after her story first broke. By that time, Singh had already turned down an opportunity to take Kamala to the United States so she could be examined directly. With her death, all that the scientists had to work with were Singh's own first-hand observations.
There was certainly little documentation available on Kamala and the younger girl. Not only had Singh failed to get affidavits from the hunters who had been with him when the girls were rescued (to verify the wolf-den story) but there were no medical reports either. Singh had apparently refused to allow medical doctors to examine the two girls at the time of their rescue despite his apparent concern over their condition. Some controversy also developed over whether it had been Singh who had discovered the girls as he claimed or whether they had been rescued by local villagers.
By the late 1930s, anthropologist Robert Zingg had been granted permission by Singh to publish his diary about the wolf girls. While Zingg insisted that the case was "well-documented", other scientists had since dismissed the entire idea that children could be raised by wild animals. Since Singh was an untrained observer with a poor command of English, Western researchers tended to regard him as being too credulous to be taken seriously. In 1942, Zingg published his own book, Wolf-Children and Feral Man. Co-written with Singh, the book was basically a defense of Singh's original account along with pictures of both wolf girls and a full reprint of an 1833 translation of a book on Kaspar Hauser. Whatever Zingg's intention, his book was not taken seriously. Even eminent anthropologist Ashley Montagu wrote that, while he would like to have believed the story, "no scientist can accept as true any statement of a fellow-scientist or the statement of anyone else until it has been independently confirmed by others." Other scientists would not be so polite with their scorn.
Which brings us to Arnold Lucius Gesell. One of the founders of the Yale Clinic of Child Development (now the Yale Child Study Center), Gesell is now recognized as a pioneer in the field of child development. An author of numerous manuals for teaching "deficient children" as well as a leading authority in special education, Gesell was very much a prominent authority in his field. He also wrote popular books about infant development and behaviour as well as advice about child-rearing, all of which made him a household name (think of him as the "Doctor Spock" of his day). Parents often relied on Gesell's guides to infant development to monitor how their children were progressing compared to the norms laid out in his books and videos. When news about the wolf girls first came out, Gesell followed the story closely and also stayed in contact with Reverend Singh and Robert Zingg to learn all that he could.
It was this fascination that led Arnold Gesell to publish his own book about Kamala in 1941. The book, Wolf Child and Human Child, was meant to combat the skepticism over Kamala's case and to clear the way for Zingg's own publication (which had been delayed in publication due to resistance from other scientific skeptics). Describing Kamala's story as "the most singular and perhaps the most remarkable which has ever been told of any human child", Gesell had serious difficulty covering the numerous gap in Kamala's story and even admitted that he had "to summon imagination and even invent a few conjectures to fill the gaps of actual knowledge." For Gesell, "filling the gaps" involved drawing on his own extensive research with other children to explain Kamala's abnormal development. He even made numerous comparisons to Mowgli and his relationship with the "Mother Wolf" to describe how Kamala became more human on her return to civilization.
Beginning with a chapter describing Kamala's birth, Gesell described Kamala's entire "life cycle" and how she was eventually "weaned from wolf ways." He even included a chapter on "Heredity and Culture" and the influence of Kamala's birth mother, the she-wolf, and Mrs. Singh whom he regarded as the three primary female figures in her life. About the care that the two wolf-girls received from the she-wolf, Gesell became downright lyrical in his description:
"She licked and cleansed her cubs; she kept the floor tidy; she warmed them when necessary with her shaggy hide. For weeks she rilled her breasts for them; and weaned them to flesh by chewing it for them and by preparing tidbits from the kill. She permitted them to leave the den when they were about two months old, but not until they were ten to twelve months old and had shed their milk teeth did she permit them to shift for themselves."
As for some of the mysteries surrounding Kamala's story, including the possibility that she had been deliberately abandoned by her birth parents, Gesell did little but touch on them briefly. In writing about the trauma of Kamala's removal from the wolf den, the death of her young "sister", and the later attempts by the Singh's to socialize Kamala, Gesell produced no new information but relied exclusively on Singh's diaries. As for Kamala -whom he never saw- Gesell described her as "a potentially normal child, who in spite of extremely abnormal isolation retained to the end distinguishing marks of normality."
Gesell also dismissed suggestions that Kamala and her "sister" may have had pre-existing medical problems that led to them being abandoned. Though Gesell had established some of the first assessment centres for children with intellectual disabilities, he insisted that the "available evidence strongly denotes that Kamala was born a normal infant and that she suffered no inflammatory illness or physical injury which destroyed the normal potentialities of her brain development. She presented no sensory defects." The fact that Kamala had never been formally assessed by a trained professional and that no real information about her infancy was available was another issue that Gesell managed to dismiss. He largely based his assumptions about her being normal on her successful adjustment to the wolf-den and then to how she functioned at the orphanage.
Working from the assumption that Kamala had developed normally, Gesell then used her later development to demonstrate his theories about child development. Despite her early environment and apparent difficulties adjusting to living as a human, he concluded that "From the standpoint of genetic and of clinical psychology the most significant phenomenon in the life career of Kamala is the slow but orderly and sequential recovery of obstructed mental growth."
If the Reverend Singh voiced his own concerns about Kamala's development at the orphanage, Gesell showed no doubts whatsoever in his book. He boldly argued that, "From the standpoint of genetic and of clinical psychology the most significant phenomenon in the life career of Kamala is the slow but orderly and sequential recovery of obstructed mental growth." He also regarded her story as being a symbol of hope given that World War II was underway at the time. Considering that nations were acting like wolves and committing countless acts of mass murder, he argued that "the dignity and stamina of the human spirit are enhanced rather than clouded by the marvelous career of Kamala."
Despite her death, Gesell insisted that her story was a case of heredity overcoming environmental problems (though he was likely too optimistic about that). His obsession with Kamala's story seems hard to understand given that he was an otherwise careful scientist who had built his reputation on his work with thousands of children. Devoting an entire book to a child he had never seen and only learned about through second-hand sources seems very unlike the Arnold Gesell that had become an eminent authority on child development. It likely didn't help that he accepted so much of Singh's story at face value without being at least a little skeptical.
Still, Gesell's eminence saved him from much of the vicious criticism that Robert Zingg received. While Zingg would eventually be forced out of teaching due to the fallout from his book, Gesell largely put the controversy behind him. Whether it contributed to his decision to retire a few years after his book on Kamala came out is hard to determine.
And a certain amount of skepticism is definitely needed considering later revelations about the case of the two wolf-girls. Later anthropologists such as Ashley Montagu voiced their own doubts about Singh's story given the total lack of any supporting documentation. Montagu also pointed out various inconsistencies in what Singh wrote about the girls, including his insistence that they both "howled" at certain times, despite the fact that this completely contradicts actual wolf behaviour. He also noted the sheer implausibility of a she-wolf raising a child for seven years when real wolf-cubs would be able to fend for themselves by the time they are one year old.
Other critics were even more scathing. According to a 2007 book by surgeon Serge Aroles, most of the details provided by Singh about the two wolf-girls were, if not a deliberate fraud, certainly distorted. Not only had Singh's diary been completely written six years after Kamala's death but the "classic" pictures of the two wolf-girls showing them behaving like wolves were actually fakes. Taken years after Kamala's death, the pictures were of two other girls in the orphanage who had been asked to pose as wolf-girls at Singh's request (these were the pictures prominently displayed in the books by Gesell and Zingg). Several reliable witnesses also reported that Singh had beaten Kamala to force her to behave as a wolf-girl whenever he presented her to visitors.
So why would Singh lie about Kamala? The most obvious explanation was to raise money for his underfunded orphanage. Not only did Robert Zingg convince Reverend Singh that the story of the wolf-girls would be financially valuable, but he also sent Singh a royalty payment of $500 after their book was published - money that was badly needed. Though interest in Kamala's case petered out eventually, Singh and his wife had a clear motive to maintain the wolf-girl pretense as long as possible. Aroles concluded in his book that the "wolf-girl" story likely obscured the real tragedy: that Kamala and her "sister", like countless other female children in India, had been deliberately abandoned by their parents, possibly due to pre-existing congenital problems (Aroles suspected Rett syndrome in Kamala's case).
Though the discovery of the two girls in a wolf-den is likely not implausible (since recorded cases of wolves "adopting" abandoned children have been recorded before), the actual amount of time they spent in the den will never be known for certain. All that can really be established was that the Reverend Singh took in two girls who had been abandoned under extraordinary circumstances and attempted to raise them to the best of his ability. Whether he invented the wolf-girl story completely or simply exaggerated many of the details to drum up interest, he still managed to generate the international support that might have been completely lacking otherwise.
So, was Kamala a true "wolf girl"? Perhaps. In terms of investigating the possibility of feral children, the case has serious flaws however. As for more down-to-earth issues such as child abandonment and neglect, people championing Kamala's case appeared to miss the point completely. However long she spent in the wild (with or without a wolf caring for her), Kamala's impaired development reflects the problems seen in institutionalized and neglected children around the world. That cases such as this continue to be reported even today reflects the critical need for better care for high-risk children.
Whether or not a wolf is involved.
Comments