Kadamba flowers, and the sun and moon for earrings

The kadamba is her tree. Neolamarckia cadamba puts out dense spherical heads of orange flower at the beginning of the monsoon, and the association with this goddess is thoroughly established: Śaṅkara sets her island palace in a grove of them, using the synonym nīpa; this stotra will later call her kadambavanavāsinī, dweller in the kadamba grove, at name sixty, and kadambakusumapriyā, lover of kadamba blossoms, at name three hundred and twenty-three; and the great southern temple of Madurai remembers itself as having grown up in a kadamba forest. So the sprig over her ear is not a stray botanical detail. It is a badge, and by the time the reciter reaches name sixty the tree will have been named three times.

Karṇapūra, the word for the ornament, is itself half flower and half jewellery: the dictionary defines it as an ornament worn round the ear, especially one of flowers, and then goes on to list it as a name for the blue lotus and for the aśoka tree. That ambiguity is exactly what the name exploits. The tāṭaṅka of the second line is unambiguous — a specific kind of ear-pendant — and it has a life of its own in the south. At the Jambukeśvara temple at Tiruvanaikkaval the goddess is said to wear tāṭaṅkas in the form of Śrīcakras, installed, tradition holds, by Śaṅkara himself to temper her fierceness; the story is widely told and impossible to date, but it shows how heavily this particular ornament is freighted.

Making the sun and moon her earrings puts her body on a cosmic scale for the first time since the third verse drowned the world-eggs in her light. The two luminaries hang at the level of the face, one on each side, and the reader is expected to hold the small image and the enormous one at once without choosing between them. This is the ordinary logic of the aṅga-varṇana in a hymn to a supreme deity: the description must stay a description of a woman's face and must also be a description of everything.

There is a small philological prize buried in the second name. The word printed here as oḍupa does not exist independently. The dictionary knows uḍupa — a raft, and, because the half-moon is shaped like a boat, the moon. Tapana, the sun, plus uḍupa gives tapanoḍupa, because a final a and an initial u merge into o. The o at the seam is the sandhi, not the word. Anyone hunting oḍupa in Monier-Williams will find nothing; the moon in her ear is a little boat.

This verse contains what is probably the rarest character you will meet in the whole thousand names. Kḷpta is written कॢप्त, with the vowel sign ॢ — the syllabic ḷ, which has its own place in the alphabet between ṝ and e, its own independent letter ऌ, and almost no words to appear in. In the entire Lalitā Sahasranāma it occurs exactly twice: here at name twenty-one, and again at name one hundred and twenty-eight in līlākḷpta. Both are forms of the root kḷp, to arrange or fashion, which is very nearly the only root that uses it. Pronounce it as a syllabic l — the l itself carrying the beat, as in the second syllable of "little" said quickly — although most reciters in practice say something close to klipta, and that is the accepted convention. Either way, it is worth stopping to look at the character, because you are unlikely to see it again.

The two ornament words are consonant exercises of different kinds. Kadambamañjarī has the conjunct ñj, in which the palatal nasal is made at exactly the place of the j that follows it. Tāṭaṅka runs a retroflex ṭ, then a second retroflex ṭ, then the guttural nasal of ṅk — three places of articulation in five syllables, with the tongue travelling back, staying back, and then dropping to the velum.

Yugalībhūta contains a piece of grammar worth naming. Yugala, a pair, becomes yugalī- before a form of the root bhū: the final vowel lengthens to ī and the whole thing means "having become a pair". Sanskrit grammarians call this the cvi construction, and it turns any noun into a verb of becoming. Her sun and moon have not been made into earrings; they have become a pair of earrings. Hearing the ī as a grammatical marker rather than as part of the stem makes the compound fall apart cleanly.

The two lines are metrically very different in feel. The first is light and quick — kadamba, mañjarī and manohara are all built of short syllables and open vowels — while the second is heavy from tāṭaṅka onwards, with the long ā of tāṭaṅka and yugalībhūta weighing it down. Let that difference stand rather than evening the line out. The flower is light and the sun and the moon are not.

For contemplation: the verse offers a good exercise in holding two magnitudes at once. Look at the sprig of blossom. Then look at the earrings. Then try to keep both in the same picture without letting either become a symbol of the other.