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The attacks on people, especially children, in Uttar Pradesh’s Bahraich may well be one of the biggest wildlife stories to emerge from India this year.
Fanned by media coverage that has almost bordered on the hysterical, the attacks have ignited fears regarding the Indian wolf (Canis lupus pallipes), a species already on the verge of obliteration.
Their grasslands long gone and derisively referred to as ‘wastelands’ today, their numbers depleted by centuries of targeted hunting, especially during the colonial era, the wolves of India’s plains have clung on, nevertheless, largely due to their ability to remain ‘unseen’ as wildlife historian Mahesh Rangarajan puts it in his 1999 paper The Raj and the natural world: The war against 'dangerous beasts' in colonial India.
But Bahraich may very well put a spanner in the works.
Nothing can be more ironical than the fact that the current state of affairs is best portrayed in a centuries-old tale from Medieval Europe. The fear of the wolf, of losing livestock and of losing one’s own life by being torn into pieces by razor-sharp fangs…this tale has it all, just like Bahraich.
But How St. Francis Tamed the very Fierce Wolf of Gubbio is much more than just a story about how a man of God miraculously saved a town in medieval Italy from a ‘man-eating’ wolf.
It is so much more. A powerful allegory about the very nature of what it means to be… human.
Francis of Assisi (1181-3 October 1226) was and remains a towering figure in Christianity.
The founder of the Franciscan monastic order in Catholicism, Francis was known for his piety. Although born to a rich silk merchant father and a mother from a noble family, he renounced everything sometime in his youth to live the life of poverty, after having a vision of Christ in 1205 CE. As per tradition, Jesus commanded Francis to “Rebuild my church (the Christian community in a figurative sense) that is in ruins”.
Francis is known for his association with non-human animals and the environment. Hagiographies of the saint tell us about his various encounters with animals and birds, all of whom he referred to as ‘brothers and sisters’. So enduring has been the influence of these stories (some of which mention that Francis could also communicate with birds and animals) that World Animal Day is today celebrated on October 4, the feast day of St Francis.
“When Jesuit Jorge Mario Bergoglio, formerly cardinal of Buenos Aires, Argentina, took Francis as his papal name, it provided a powerful example of the continued influence of St. Francis of Assisi,” Mary R McHugh, professor in Classical Studies at the Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota, US, wrote in her 2015 essay, The Wolf of Gubbio in Context: The Igreja da Pampulha, Brazil.
“The story of the Wolf of Gubbio first appeared in the Fioretti di San Francesco, a compilation of stories about St. Francis circulating in the mid-fourteenth century and attributed to Ugolino Brunforte,” writes McHugh.
The story recounts how a very fierce wolf used to terrorise the people of the town of Gubbio in the Umbria region of the central Italian Peninsula. Such was the terror it unleashed that the townsfolk refused to go beyond the safety of the town walls, into the countryside, for fear of being killed and eaten.
Francis, who was in the town at that time, decided to mend matters. He went out of the town gates to where the wolf was. Miraculously, the wolf did not attack him. Francis addressed the animal as ‘Brother Wolf’ and commanded him, in the name of God, to leave his beastly ways.
Francis then mediated a ‘verbal pact’ between the townsfolk and the wolf. As per the treaty, the townsfolk would feed the wolf. In return, it would refrain from attacking any human being.
The Fioretti notes that the treaty held and that the wolf, in fact, became the pet of the town until it died a natural death two years after the pact.
Whether the tale about the wolf of Gubbio is a historically accurate one is not known. McHugh quotes distinguished professor of history, William R Cook here: “According to Cook, “the story is genuinely Franciscan although I do not know to what extent it is historical”.
That being said, the story has been treasured by the faithful, who along with scholars, find it to be rich in Christian symbolism and themes.
The one element that is all-pervasive in the story is the wolf-motif. While the wolf has always been one of Europe’s top carnivores and predators, the continent’s Christinisation meant that its masses viewed the species differently from their pagan ancestors.
“The biblical tradition represents the wolf as the anti-Christ who would hide amongst the sheep (the metaphorical Christian congregation and community) and kill them or prevent their souls from being saved. In a theological sense, this meant that the wolf would turn the Christians away from God and lead them to the eternal sufferings of hell,” Detlev M G Weber notes in his 2023 paper, Saint Francis’s Brother Wolf.
Indeed, the Bible says in Isiah 11.6 that when the Messiah comes, there will be peace and “[t]he wolf will live with the lamb.”
In his paper, Weber notes that St Francis sees in the wolf, an image of himself. Like the wolf, the saint opted for poverty. He lived the life of a mendicant and beggar, which led his angry father to get him imprisoned and his brother to humiliate him. He thus became an outcast, something like the wolf.
According to Weber, by addressing the wolf as ‘brother’, Francis shows that all beings, human and non-human, are the ‘children of God’. This appellation — Brother Wolf — even implies that Francis believes the wolf to be a friar who has strayed.
While Francis has been able to control the desperation that poverty brings, the wolf, on the other hand has committed murder and thus sinned.
But Francis, the man of God, is able to persuade the wolf to agree to a truce with the townsfolk. According to Weber, the story has a message here: Even the worst of sinners have good in them. They just need help to be reformed and welcomed back into human society. The town of Gubbio is ‘civilisation’, while the wolf is the perpetual ‘outsider’. With Francis acting as an intermediary and diplomat, both sides lose fear of ‘The Other’ and peace prevails, a metaphor for the Christian concept of Paradise.
The story also shows the wolf as a ‘punishment’, a scourge sent by God on the townsfolk, who have become avaricious and take more than their share of resources (this may sound familiar to readers of environmental issues).
Once the people agree to use only what is needed by them, the wolf threat goes away. And peace (equilibrium) is established.
This, perhaps, may be the biggest teaching for those going hysterical over Bahraich. The ‘wolf’ is not a poor harassed animal species. It is everything negative inside the human heart. It is this ‘wolf’ that really needs to be killed. And peace shall prevail.