French surgeon Serge Aroles concluded in his book L'Enigme des enfants-loup (Enigma of the Wolf-Children, 2007) that the story was a hoax.
In 1926, Joseph Amrito Lal Singh, the rector of the local orphanage, published an account in The Statesman published from Calcutta saying that the two girls were given to him by a man who lived in the jungle near the village of Godamuri, in the district of Midnapore, west of Calcutta, and that the girls, when he first saw them, lived in a sort of cage near the house.
I was simply amazed to think that an animal had such a noble feeling surpassing even that of mankind ... to bestow all the love and affection of a fond and ideal mother on these peculiar beings."
Singh claims in his diary that, at the orphanage, the two girls showed wolf-like behaviour typical for feral children.
As babies they had been abandoned, and, in a measure duplicating the young lives of Romulus and Remus, had been mothered by a female wolf.
After years of hard work, she was able to walk upright a little, although never proficiently and would often revert to all fours when she needed to go somewhere quickly, and learned to speak a few words.
The "myth" of having been raised by wolves is an ancient Indo-European conception (see: feral child) to explain the animal-like behaviour of abandoned children with congenital defects.
According to the French surgeon Serge Aroles, the case of Amala and Kamala is the most scandalous swindle concerning feral children.