[imagesource:here]

Many of the popular fairy tales that we were told as children started out for the ears of adults only, with gory elements that would give any youngster a week’s worth of nightmares.

Some of the stories that we know and love also had tragic real-life versions until Disney stepped in to make things happy and romantic.

On the cards today, via All Things Interesting, is the terrible true story of a feral boy found in India’s Uttar Pradesh jungle in 1867, and who went on to inspire Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book.

It can be said that The Jungle Book is a reasonably lovely story about Mowgli, a boy who learns the ways of the animal kingdom, raised by wolves instead of humans.

When Disney got hold of the novel, they turned the story into an uplifting message about boyhood and the harmony between civilisation and nature.

Meanwhile, the real-life Mowgli was found in a questionable condition in a cave by hunters and discovered to be more wolf-like than human-like.

Image: All Things Interesting

His name was Dina Sanichar, after the Hindi word for Saturday  – the day he was brought into the Sikandra Mission Orphanage by the hunters who didn’t want to leave him in the jungle.

He was later referred to as “Wolf Boy” when the missionaries who allegedly tried to get the feral out of him realised that the gap between human behaviour and animal instinct was too wide for Sanichar to overcome.

Image: Twitter/Ewan Morrison

According to their accounts, Sanichar’s behaviour resembled that of an animal more than a human:

He walked around on all fours and had difficulty standing on his own two feet. He only ate raw meat and gnawed on bones to sharpen his teeth.

Trying to teach him how to walk and talk proved almost impossible as his communication style was worlds apart from that of people:

Whenever he wanted to express himself, he would growl or howl just like a wolf does.

Second, he also didn’t understand signing; because wolves do not point (or have any fingers, for that matter) this universal gesture was probably meaningless to him.

Sanichar spent the rest of his life with the missionaries but he never did learn to speak, although he did learn to stand upright, dress, and even smoke cigarettes.

Funnily enough, Sanichar was not the only “wolf child” living at the Sikandra Mission Orphanage at the time:

If superintendent Lewis is to be believed, he was joined by two other boys and one 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 they no longer looked up when another kid was discovered in the jungle.

Although, in many of the “wolf children” cases, the missionaries were the only sources, so whether the kids were really feral remains up for debate:

Some believe the missionaries may have invented them for media attention.

Others hypothesize the children may not have been raised by animals at all and that they actually had an intellectual and or physical disability.

In that case, the stories may have resulted from people jumping to conclusions about their behavior.

Yup, that sounds like the real world, alright.

[source:allthatsinteresting]