The Man Who Was Raised by Wolves from Birth Until 1872

The true story of a human phenomenon.

Dina Sanichar, the man in the picture, is believed to have been raised by the wolves, also known as the real-life Mowgli. He was born in India, and hunters discovered him in the deep jungles of Uttar Pradesh in 1872. They found him hunting alongside the wolves and noted that he was walking on all four of his limbs; they soon captured him by killing the wolves. 

Mowgli (/ˈmaʊɡli/) is a fictional character and the protagonist of the Mowgli stories featured in Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. He is a feral boy from Seoni, Madhya Pradesh, India, who appeared in Kipling's short story "In the Rukh" and later became the main character in The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book.

In reality, Christian missionaries brought him to an orphanage and gave him the name Sanichar (Urdu/Hindi word for Saturday). They observed that although he could not speak, he possessed good reasoning ability and sometimes even shrewdness. 

He only ate raw meat, disliked clothes, and sharpened his teeth. Although he didn’t speak, he made strange animal sounds. He never got much closer to any human except for another feral man, nor did he ever learn to speak the human language. He always used to smell his food, had trouble standing on two legs, and avoided the company of most humans. The only human habit he willingly adopted was smoking. 

Most people who were kept away from human contact could not learn to speak any language. They mostly used their mouths to make distinct sounds. Studies have shown that if a baby has no human contact, such as in this case, they’ll lose the ability to learn after a certain period, roughly around five years old. 

Kipling’s famous tale, later adapted into several films by Disney, ends with an uplifting message about self-discovery and harmony between human civilization and nature. However, few people know that it may have been based on tragic true events.

He went on to live among other humans for over twenty years but never learned to speak and remained seriously impaired his entire life. Sanichar was a heavy smoker and died of tuberculosis in 1895 at 34 years old.

Besides the peculiarities of this story, and beyond our personal opinions on whether he should have been extracted at all from his native jungle, more ethical issues come to mind.

Did we have the right to treat him like we did? Or killing the only family he ever knew, and if so, why?

There’s plenty of food-for-thought within the story.

We don’t have access to the records, if any, of what the hunters had in mind.

However, it’s quite possible, they thought they were doing the right thing.

That, unfortunately, we’ll never know for sure.

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