India in Mind

by Pankaj Mishra

  In the evening she and I took a rickshaw to Narangpur. The thakur was still at market, so we sat in his courtyard while a crowd of villagers entertained us with imitations of Shamdev's antics, growling and baring their teeth. Narsing Bahadur Singh, when he did appear, was an erect, mild-mannered man in his fifties, dressed in white handwoven khaki cloth, and with a striped towel draped over his shoulders. He owned six acres of land, planted corn, dal, and rice, and was accounted rich. He had, it turned out, a history of adopting stray children. Besides his own two sons, he had brought up four other boys found abandoned in the wild. One of these, a gawky adolescent called Ramdev, was bundling straw into a loft. The thakur was insistent on one point: Ramdev was a mad boy; Shamdev was not mad, he was a “wolf-boy.”

  With the help of Sister Clarice's translation, I pieced together an outline of the story: It had happened early one morning about five years ago. It was the dry season but he couldn't be sure what month. He had bicycled to see his cousin, who lived in a village on the far side of Musafirkhana forest, about twenty miles from Sultanpur. On his way back to the main trunk road, the track cut through thickets of bamboo and thornbushes and, behind one of these, he heard the noise of squealing. He crept up and saw the boy at play with four or five wolf-cubs. He was most emphatic that they were not dogs or jackals, but wolves.

  The boy had very dark skin, fingernails grown into claws, a tangle of matted hair and calluses on his palms, his elbows, and knees. Some of his teeth were broken to sharp points. He ran rapidly on all fours, yet couldn't keep up with the cubs as they bolted for cover. The mother wolf was not in sight. The thakur caught up with the boy, and was bitten on the hand. He did, however, succeed in trussing him up in his towel, lashed him to the pillion of his bicycle, and rode home.

  At first Shamdev cowered from people and would only play with dogs. He hated the sun and liked to curl up in shadowy places. After dark, he grew restless and they had to tie him up to stop him following the jackals that howled around the village at night. If anyone cut themselves, he immediately smelled the scent of blood, and would scamper toward it. He caught chickens and ate them alive, including the entrails. Later, when he had evolved a sign language of his own, he would cross his thumbs and flap his hands: this meant “chicken” or “food.”

  Eventually the thakur decided to wean him off red meat. He force-fed him with rice, dal, and chapatis, but these made him sick. He took to eating earth, his chest swelled up, and they began to fear for his life. Only gradually did he get used to the new diet. After five months he began to stand: two years later he was doing odd jobs, like taking straw to the cows.

  “He's mine,” said Narsing Bahadur Singh, angrily. “I want him back. I will go to Lucknow to fetch him.”

  “I'll take you,” I said.

  At six the next morning he was waiting for the taxi, all dressed up in spotless whites. As the taxi passed through the forest at Musafirkhana he pointed to the track, but we couldn't go and see the place because the driver was in a hurry and threatened to dump us and return to Sultanpur.

  There were at least a hundred mentally defective children at the Mother Teresa Mission. We were greeted there by an elderly man, Ananda Ralla Ram, who had been a barrister before devoting himself to charity. He turned his legal mind onto the subject of Shamdev and gave the thakur quite a grilling. We tried to explore the story from every angle, in an effort to find a flaw or contradiction. The thakur's answers were always consistent.

  When the Sisters brought in the boy, he stood tottering in the doorway, screwing up his eyes to see who it was. Then, recognizing his old friend, he jumped into the air, flung himself around his neck, and grinned.

  I watched him for about two hours. Nothing much happened. He cuffed a child; he made his growling noises; he made the sign for “chicken”; sometimes he would point to the sky, circling his index finger as if describing the sun or moon. The calluses had gone, but you could see the scar tissue on his knees. He also had scars on the sides of his head: these, according to the thakur, had been made by the wolf-mother when she picked him up with her teeth.

  The thakur left the Mission with me. He had been gearing himself for a scene; but the firm smiles of the Sisters unnerved him. He asked, meekly, if he could come again. He seemed very upset when it was time to say good-bye. So was Shamdev, and they hugged one another.

  The discovery of an authentic wolf-child would be of immense importance to students of human and animal behavior. But though I felt that Narsing Bahadur Singh was speaking the truth, it was a very different matter to prove it.

  The best-documented account of Indian wolf-children is that of Kamala and Amala, who, in 1920, were dug out of a wolf lair in Orissa by the Reverend J. A. L. Singh. The younger girl, Amala, died—although her “sister” lived on for nine years at the orphanage of Midnapore, during which time Singh kept a diary of her adjustment to human life.

  Extracts from the diary have recently been republished in a book called The Wolf Children by Charles Maclean. On reading through it, I kept being struck by parallels between the girls and Shamdev: their sharpened teeth, their calluses, the craving for blood, the earth-eating, chicken-killing, the love of darkness, and their friendship with dogs and jackals. Maclean, however, concluded that the Reverend Singh's story is shot with inconsis-tencies—and that it does not hang together.

  Another investigator, Professor Robert Zingg, collected in his Wolf Children and Feral Man all the known texts relating to children reared by animals, as well as stories of The Wild Boy of Aveyron and the legendary Kaspar Hauser. As for Shamdev, by far the most interesting comparisons are to be made with the reports in Major-General Sir W. H. Skinner's A Journey through the Kingdom of Oudh (1849–50):five of his six cases of wolf-children come from the region of Sultanpur. He writes:

  Zoolfikur Khan, a respectable landowner from Bankepoor in the estate of Hassanpoor, 10 miles from the Sultanpoor cantonments, mentions that about eight or nine years ago a trooper came to town with a lad of about 9 or 10 years of age whom he had rescued from wolves among the ravines of the road… that he walked on his legs like other people when he saw him, though there were evident signs on his knees and elbows of having gone very long on all fours…He could not talk or utter any very articulate sound…he understood signs and understood exceedingly well and would assist the cultivators in turning trespassing cattle out of their fields…

  His story could be that of Shamdev.

  During the nineteenth century, when such tales were commoner, the most famous “wolf-man” in India was Dina Sanichar, who lived at the Sicandra Orphanage in Agra from 1867 till his death in 1895. He probably gave Kipling the model for Mowgli. He, too, had a craving for raw meat and, when forced to give it up, would sharpen his teeth on stones.

  In zoological terms, there are almost insuperable difficulties in the way of a female Indian wolf actually being able to rear a human baby. First, she would have to lose her own brood: to keep her milk, and to be on the lookout for a substitute cub. She would have to scent the baby but, instead of making a meal of it, allow its cries to stifle her hunger drives and signal to her maternal instincts. Finally, since a wolf-cub's period of dependence is so much shorter than a human infant's, she might have three litters of her own before her adopted child could fend for itself. She would also have to protect it and post “Keep off!” signals to other wolves whose hunger might get the better of them.

  One alternative explanation is that the wolf-boys or girls are autistic children, abandoned by their parents once they realize their condition; who somehow survive in the forest and, when rescued, seem to behave like wolves. Or could it be that the wolves around Sultanpur have a natural affiliation with man? There are no absolute conclusions to be drawn. But I came away convinced that Shamdev's story was as convincing as any other. Someone should get to the bottom of it.

  1978

  ROBYN DAVIDSON

  (1950–)

  Born in Queensland, Australia, Robyn Davidson has spen
t much of her life in London and India. In the late 1970s she traveled 1,700 miles across Australia with camels—a journey that became the subject of her bestselling book, Tracks (1979). It was not long afterwards that she went to India and acquired the romantic desire of traveling with the Rabari nomads of western India on their migratory journey across the Thar Desert. The wish was not fulfilled until a decade later, and then with unexpected results. The book she published about her travels, Desert Places (1996), from which the following excerpt is taken, describes the threatened marginal ways of nomads in a world that seeks its redemption in embracing modernity. It also records unflinchingly the destruction of her own illusions about the old superseded world. The possibility of escape is no longer there: “One carries the self,” she writes, “like a heavy old suitcase wherever one goes.” But there are moments of intimacy and solitude, and Davidson often found herself discovering a strange, compelling beauty even amid the squalor of modernizing India.

  from DESERT PLACES

  Americans waved flags in their streets, Iraqis mopped up blood in theirs. The Kuwaiti ruling family came home to initiate the torture of anyone they didn't like. Arms dealers counted their winnings. In India those children who had decided not to immolate themselves as their chums had done in protest against the Mandal Commission went back to school. Religious fanatics cooled down temporarily, the better to incite hatred another day. Politicians threw chairs at each other in parliament. Petrol dribbled back into bowsers. All was right with the world again.

  But was it really useful, I asked myself, to travel with a bunch of nomads no one has ever heard of ? So what if the Rabari will be extinct within fifty years? Who in the world will give a damn? And what good would it do them even if a thousand people, even if a million people, did give a damn? And so what if nomadism was about to go out, phut, like a candle, the whole world over? The culture of the millennium had bigger things to worry about.

  But I'd committed myself and there was no turning back. The Chaitri festival—an annual livestock fair—was to start in a few weeks. There, I could buy myself some camels and Dilip could fly in from Delhi or Canada or wherever he was to take his pictures. Along the way I would call in at Rabari dhanis (hamlets) until I found just that group…

  Meanwhile I visited several villages with Koju but, as I had not been able to find an interpreter, the nets I pulled up were empty. Often I would drive for ten hellish hours for a prearranged meeting, only to find that my informant had disappeared to a wedding or a death or had just disappeared. And when I did find someone who purported to be “the representative of the Rabari,” my obsession with the specific was usually met with vagueness or with promises of assistance which vanished when delivery time came. Others, lured by the smell of “phoren” wealth, offered their doubtful services for fabulous sums.

  Eventually I found one young man—Purnendu Kaavori— who worked at the Institute for Development Studies in Jaipur. He had traveled with a group of Rajput graziers into Haryana, later writing a thesis about them. He was pleased to offer advice and help but warned me that he, a local who spoke the language, had had great difficulty in persuading any group to take him on migration. They would be doubly uncertain about taking a woman.

  Narendra as usual came to the rescue. In the middle of a schedule that would kill a person of lesser vitality, he had managed to find Bhairon Singh Raika—an ex-nomad, now constable in the Rajasthan police force—whom I could employ to liaise with the Rabari.

  For our first interview Bhairon Singh wore Dacron stovepipes and a white nylon shirt which clung, sweatily, to his concave chest. When he boasted of the level of fitness required to enter the police force and how many other applicants less physically endowed than himself had fallen by the wayside, it was difficult not to smile. He was one of the half-dozen Raika in service, he could speak a little Hindi, knew all the Raika from Jodhpur to Jupiter and plenty of others as well, and would, he assured me, be able to explain the situation to less cosmopolitan members of his caste. He would accompany me to Chaitri livestock festival to assist in the purchase of the camels; he would most certainly find me a dang (migrating herd) to travel with. In the meantime would I like to attend a Raika wedding in his own village, Baabara?

  The next day we all took our spoonful of the proffered jaggery and yogurt, Koju brought his hands together in prayer before starting the engine and, thus fortified against bad luck, Bhairon, Koju, and I quit the farm gates. This time, I felt sure, the logjam was going to move.

  A cool desert wind wrapped us in dust as we sped along the bitumen. There was no horizon. Trees emerged by the side of the road, to be swallowed up again by the dun pastel of our cocoon. “Yesssss!” shouted Bhairon, ejecting me out of reverie with a bang on the shoulder. “Raika!” The jeep flashed past a smudge of red and glitter, and camels concealed among the trees. The deeper we penetrated Bhairon's country the happier and more garrulous he became. Every Raika we spotted precipitated another bellowing “yesss” and a lot of hysterical bouncing around in the backseat. Koju drove implacably on until we reached our destination—Baabara, a cluster of old stone bungalows.

  Bhairon's people had previously been camel breeders from the northern deserts. They had arrived in this more fertile area a couple of generations ago, taken over an almost abandoned village, switched to sheep, and were now better off and better organized than many others of their caste. Important resources were located nearby in Jaipur: merchants, wool depots, veterinary hospitals, and various government agencies to control migration. Their flocks numbered in the thousands, earning them the nickname of “migrating millionaires.” I had been told that some politicians and wealthy landowners were in the habit of giving their own sheep to these people to take on migration and that through these men the graziers could gain illegal access to protected (and rapidly disappearing) forests. When I asked Bhairon about this he pretended not to understand the question.

  I was ushered into Bhairon's home. Up six front steps to a courtyard bordered by an L-shaped house consisting of a room for the buffalo, a kitchen, and two bedrooms. Mrs. Bhairon brought her only chair out into the courtyard. I was made to sit on it like a reigning monarch while Koju was given the charpoi. Crowds gathered, introductions were made. Bhairon bustled about and gave commands to his pregnant wife who, I imagined, wore a long-suffering look under her pink orni. All I had to do was smile a great deal and accept, graciously, his orgy of generosity. We were plied with the best food he could offer, drenched in expensive ghee. I wasn't hungry but not wishing to insult our host I watched Koju for clues. A rondo of etiquette ensued: Koju raising his hands politely to refuse the hovering ladle, Bhairon cajoling, Koju acquiescing to a tiny morsel, only to have a quarter pound of hot ghee dumped on his plate. Later he explained, “For Marwari man, guest is most important.”

  Our stomachs swollen, our belches politely thunderous, it was time to socialize. I was shown each of the rooms, all of the treasures. In the kitchen where Mrs. Bhairon had been thumping dough over a tiny fire, smoke and chili filled the air. Bhairon indicated his spouse and said, “She is not a good cook. No, a very bad cook, I think.”

  “She is a very good cook.”

  “But she is very ugly.” He lifted the orni.

  “Not at all. She is beautiful.”

  “Then she is your servant.”

  “No, she is my saheli (female friend).”

  All this went down well and I had obviously passed the manners test. Even so, no one would let me help her with the work. I must sit and receive. Finally Bhairon brought out his pièce de résistance—a framed piece of paper on which it was stated that one Constable Bhairon Singh Raika had received twenty-five rupees and a commendation for bravery for helping to capture an infamous dacoit… One dollar did not seem a huge incentive for risking one's life in the badlands until I was told that the house next to his, a derelict but still beautiful building, had been bought for the price of a carton of my English cigarettes.

  It was time to bathe an
d dress for the wedding. A partially closed-off corner of the courtyard was indicated and a bucket of well water brought to me. What to do? I was visible for a sweep of sixty degrees and anyone entering the courtyard would get a full view. I squatted down and hastily rinsed the bits I could get at, ending up with saturated clothes but mostly dry skin. Going behind the village wall for a shit was something of a test of ingenuity also. One had to step among the clustering turds, find a couple of square inches of spare dust and hope like hell no one came past. I now understood the logic of the village women's full skirts. As for using the jar of water to clean one's rear end, I never did learn the correct technique and it's not a subject about which one feels comfortable inquiring. I tried but never quite managed to conquer squeamishness. The world is divided between those cultures which touch their own feces and those which don't. And it seems to me that those which do have a greater understanding of humankind's relationship to earth, our alpha and omega.

  Ablutions completed, a quite spectacular gold necklace was placed around my neck. Next came Mrs. Bhairon's second-best skirt. An orni was tucked into it and wrapped around my head. There followed bangles, anklets, and bells and everyone agreed that no one would ever guess I was a European. We all took photos of each other: me with two brass pots stacked on my head, my legs cut off at the knee, standing at a thirty-degree angle to the horizontal plane of the photograph and looking every inch a European, albeit of the deranged kind. Koju never did learn to use that camera.

  We squeezed our way up an alley to where the groom's party buzzed around a red tractor like Fabergé wasps, all ruby and marcasite. Every surface, saturated with the light absorbed during the day, was now giving it back to the night as a molten glow. Pigs ran about and squealed. Dogs fought each other. A man whose head and shoulders protruded a couple of feet above the crowd placed himself in front of me and grabbed the gold necklace. “Giga,” he said, which might have been a threat to strangle me but which was, I found out later, his name. He roared with laughter and went about his business. Some women festooned in red and silver came out of a house singing. They were carrying a glittering bundle which, on closer inspection, proved to be a four-year-old child. Battery-powered lights danced around his gold brocade turban and his feet were pressed into gold-trimmed shoes with backward curling points. Every other part of him was covered in satins and tinsel. He was given to me to hold as if he were the most precious thing they possessed, as if all the pride of that vastly extended family were embodied in this exquisite, grave little boy—the bind rajah—the bridegroom.