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The character of Mowgli in Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, a collection of stories originally published in 1894, becomes separated from his human family in the jungles of India before being taken in by a pack of wolves. As the man cub goes on adventures, befriending bears and panthers, fighting monkeys and snakes, he struggles to find his place in the world. Does he belong with the humans in the village? Or with the animals in the jungle? Kipling's imaginative story was famously turned into an animated adventure by Walt Disney Studios in 1967 and has since been remade and reimagined a number of times. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6e3ITsjLRIWhile Kipling's The Jungle Book is undoubtedly a work of fiction, the author may have drawn some inspiration from the real-life story of a feral man named Dina Sanichar. In the late 1800s, there were a number of reports involving children who had been found living among wild animals in the jungle. In 1872, for example, a group of hunters in Uttar Pradesh were reportedly attempting to smoke out a pack of wolves from a den when out stumbled a young boy. The hunters captured the feral child and brought him back to the Sikandra Orphanage where he was put into the care of Reverend Erhardt. As this story circulated, Valentine Ball, an Irish geologist, wrote a letter to the orphanage requesting more information. Erhardt responded, as accounted in Ball's Jungle Life in India: The above-displayed account mentions two boys who were reportedly raised by wolves. The first, who was supposedly smoked out of a wolf den, died a few months after arriving at the orphanage. During his short stay and brief life, he bonded with another child who was reportedly raised by wolves: Dina Sanichar. Sanichar was abut 14 when the above-displayed account was written and had arrived at the orphanage (via unknown means) about six years prior. While Sanichar never learned to speak, he did adapt some human behaviors, such as wearing clothes and drinking from a cup. Sanichar also reportedly took up the habit of smoking cigarettes. While the story of Sanichar's arrival at the orphanage isn't known, Ball provided some details after interrogating a guide in Agra who said that the boy was brought in to the magistrate's court along with a mother wolf and two wolf cubs. Sanichar wasn't the only wolf boy to be discovered around this time. In fact, a British general named Sir William Henry Sleeman recorded at least five other stories about children who had grown up in the jungles. In A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Sleeman recounts one story as follows: The boy in Sleeman's story, like the boy who was smoked out of the wolf's den, died a few months after being brought back to human society. While Sanichar was not the only wolf child to be found during this time, his story is unique as he was likely the only one of these children to survive into adulthood. Sanichar died in 1895. It seems rather likely that Kipling was aware of these stories when he wrote The Jungle Book, although we can't be sure if he specifically knew about Sanichar. First off, Kipling wrote The Jungle Book in 1894, which was shortly after these stories started emerging and just as fascination with the wolf boys of India was happening. Second, Kipling's father, John Lockwood Kipling, who provided illustrations for the original The Jungle Book, mentioned these wolf-child stories in his 1891 book Beast and Man in India. We haven't been able to find any instance in which Kipling specifically referred to Sanichar or any other of these wolf-child stories. The author has, however, talked about the origins of The Jungle Book on a few occasions. In his autobiography Something Of Myself, Kipling writes that he was inspired by the Masonic Lions of my childhood's magazine, and the novel Nada The Lily by H. Rider Haggard that featured a friendship between a man and a wolf. In an 1895 letter, Kipling said that he borrowed from so many sources that it was impossible to remember from whose stories I have stolen.
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