Lata Bose. Field Journal. Entry 1. October 22nd, 2023. Mumbai.The production company is called Third Eye Films, which I have always found slightly grandiose for an outfit that primarily makes documentaries about regional folklore for streaming platforms, but Samir — Samir Chaudhary, founder, director, person most likely to describe a story about roadside shrine miracles as "the next Searching for Sugarman" — is a person of large self-conception and I have worked with him for six years and the work is usually good.This one he brought to me differently.Not in the usual way, which is Samir calling at odd hours with pitches that are slightly too excited and which I have learned to assess calmly before the excitement becomes contagious and I find myself committed to something that requires me to sleep in a truck stop in Rajasthan for two weeks. This time he sent a scanned document to my email at eleven PM on a Tuesday and wrote only: Look at this and call me when you're done.The document was forty-three pages. A Colonial Survey of India report, 1887. Surveyor: Captain H.R. Elliot, stationed at Basirhat. The report was a navigational survey of the Sundarbans delta — channels, tidal zones, navigable depths, the standard apparatus of the imperial project applied to a landscape that resisted imperial categorization by being, largely, underwater half the time.On page thirty-one, in a section titled Observations of Local Practices and Unusual Features, Captain Elliot wrote the following:
Among the features noted by local boatmen in the southern portion of the Raimangal sector: a structure they designate, in the local dialect, as 'Daat Mandir' — which I am told translates approximately as Temple of Teeth, though the boatman who used the phrase declined to elaborate on the etymology or the nature of the devotional practice it implies. He said only that the structure was old — 'older than memory, older than the name of the river' — and that it was not advisable to seek it. When pressed, he said that the temple's deity required an offering that was not flowers or oil or the usual devotional materials but something that 'comes from inside.' He would say nothing further. Three subsequent boatmen, questioned separately, refused to discuss the matter at all and one man left my employ immediately upon the question being raised.
I note this not because I believe it to be of navigational or strategic significance but because local superstition in this region is unusually specific, and in my experience, unusual specificity in superstition often points to something real at its origin.
The coordinates I was given I have recorded in Appendix C. I have not verified them personally. I did not want to.I read this three times.I called Samir at eleven-forty PM.
