The story of Singh and his two wolf-girls broke in the newspapers in 1926. As one London paper noted: "At clubs frequented by big game hunters and explorers it was the chief topic at the lunch table." In fact arguments became so heated about whether the story could be true or not that the next day, the same paper was reporting on a fist fight breaking out between two members of just such a gentleman's club over the story. However, the wolf-girls did not become a topic of debate within the scientific community until two books were published over a decade later, one by Arnold Gesell, the noted Yale University child specialist, and one by Robert Zingg, a Denver anthropologist, both of which were based on the diary kept by the Reverend Singh. Gesell summed up Kamala's progress, saying that at the age of 16, after nine years in the care of the orphanage, she still had the mind of a three and a half year old. But slow though Kamala's progress was, Gesell felt her story demonstrated just how mentally naked humans are when born and how much we rely on society to shape us. As he put it, human culture operates on the mind as "a large scale moulding matrix, a gigantic conditioning apparatus" without which we would remain at the level of animals. However, while more open-minded than most about the importance of a social mould in forging man's higher mental abilities, Gesell still was wedded to a horticultural view of mental development. He believed that culture "unlocks" our dormant abilities rather than, as the bifold model suggests, that these abilities are grafted on top of the raw material of the animal mind. So, for example, Gesell saw the gradual appearance of smiles and other sociable expressions on Kamala's face as the result of the loosening of rigid muscles rather than thinking that Kamala might have had to learn such emotional signals through contact with her fellow humans. Like Singh, Gesell spoke of Kamala's wolf-like habits as if they were just an overlay of copied behaviours that thinly papered over her true human nature — or as he put it: "motor sets [which] constituted the core of her action-system and affected the organisation of her personality." Gesell wondered whether, with a few more years, Kamala would have caught up eventually with other normal children or whether the traumas of her early years had left her somehow permanently stunted. The question was never answered because in 1929, Kamala caught typhoid and died. Her last words to Singh's wife — possibly too poignant to be true — were said to have been: "Mama, the little one hurts."
Kamala and Amala, the Wolf Girls of Midnapore Date: 1920 Age: 8 Location: Midnapore, India Animals: wolves Learn more about Kamala in:
Kaspar Hausers Geschwister
The Wolf Girls : An Unsolved Mystery from History (Unsolved Mystery from History (Hardcover))