The Wolf Boy From Lucknow

Indians may not be as curious by nature as we westerners are, but e "real wolfboy" still draws a crowd, even if the Tickets cost a few annas. More than 12.000 satisfied their curiosity during the first two weeks Ramu was "at display" in the yard of the Balramphur hospital in Lucknow. The 800 rupees earned from the tickets went to a charity, that by the way, did not cover Ramu’s case.

Who doesn’t remember the story about Romulus and Remus, who was brought up in a wolf pack, or Rudyard Kipling‘s Mowgli, so let’s present another of these human beings in wolf clothes, Ramu. Ram was found in an empty carriage on Lucknow railway station in the north of India. As he is unable to speak, he can tell nothing about his life up till that point in time, but rumors has spread like the wind through the country about his strange and dangerous existence. But as you might have gathered already, poor Ramu is nothing but a mentally disabled orphan, and as such, there shouldn’t be all that difficult to find probable explanations for his some what strange behavior and lack of speech. A lot seams to suggest that Ramu has lived a lonely life in the wild, which of course is not as saying he has lived a a life of a beast of pray. Ramu, as he looked just after he was discovered in an empty carriage on Lucknow railway station. The only form of food Ramu really appreciates is raw meat. To pacify him when he has one of his frequent fits of rage, his "keeper", Hari Shukla, dangles a piece of raw meat in front of his face and automatically a relatively happy smiles spreads on the "wolfboy’s" face.

Ramu can not drink as other children do, but laps water and milk just like a dog – or like a wolf. In the western world one might have been satisfied by saying Ramu had got a bad set of teeth. But the row of honorable Indian scientists that has studied Ramu has concluded that he has carnivore teeth. This in spite of the fact that it would take hundreds, if not thousands of years for human teeth to adapt to a beast of pray’s way of life. Ramu’s  body was covered with scares, some seemingly from thorns and sharp branches and some from regular beating. An orphan in Ramu’s situation in a desperately poor and overpopulated country like India may unfortunately receive quite a rough treatment from his fellow human beings. From the Norwegian magazine "Illustert" – No 20 – 1954