Ruby mirrors and coral put to shame

Padmarāga is the third distinct word for a ruby in the first ten verses of this text. The meditation verse crowned her with māṇikya; the fourth verse strung her diadem with kuruvinda; now her cheeks are compared to a slab of padmarāga, literally "lotus-coloured". Three words, one stone, and the same red that has run through every verse since the first. A mirror of ruby is, incidentally, a fantasy object — mirrors in classical India were polished metal — which sharpens the boast. The poet has invented the most extravagant reflecting surface he can and then said her cheek is better.

The lips are compared to two things and both are conventional to the point of exhaustion. Vidruma is coral, imported and costly, the standard red of jewellery. Bimba is the ripe fruit of Coccinia grandis, the ivy gourd, a small scarlet ovoid, and comparing a woman's lower lip to it is so entrenched in Sanskrit that bimbādhara, "bimba-lipped", is simply a word for beautiful. When this name says her lips put the bimba to shame, the target is partly the cliché. Śaṅkara does the same thing at greater length, proposing coral as a comparison and then dismissing the bimba as too embarrassed even to get onto the scales.

One genuinely useful thing about this verse is that it preserves a variant. The source this site is built from records, beside radanacchadā, the alternative reading daśanacchadā. Radana and daśana are two different words for a tooth, and either compounded with chada, a cover, gives "that which covers the teeth" — a lip. The sense is identical and the manuscripts disagree about which word was used. It is worth knowing that this happens, and that the tradition has kept the alternatives in the margin rather than silently choosing. A thousand-name hymn transmitted for centuries by memory and by copyists will have such places, and pretending otherwise would misrepresent the text.

Finally, a grammatical oddity that is easy to miss while chanting. Almost every one of the thousand names is a feminine nominative singular ending in long ā. This one does not: kapolabhūḥ ends in a visarga, because kapola-bhū is a feminine noun in ū meaning the ground or region of the cheek. In the first sixty names only two behave this way — this one and mahālāvaṇyaśevadhiḥ at forty-eight. When the ending changes in a text this regular, it is a small event.

Start with the visarga, because this is the first name in the stotra that ends in one. A visarga is a voiceless breath that takes its colour from the vowel before it, so kapolabhūḥ ends with a faint echoing hu — bhū-hu, very light, released rather than pronounced. Reciters differ in how much of it they give at a pause; almost all give something. Establishing the habit here will serve for the rest of the hymn.

Two compounds in this verse end in -in stems that have lost their n. Paribhāvin, "defying, putting down", appears as paribhāvi-; nyakkārin, "humiliating", appears as nyakkāri-. This is what always happens to an -in stem inside a compound, and once you have seen it twice in one verse you will recognise it everywhere.

The hardest single word is nyakkāri. It opens with ny — the palatal nasal followed by y, both made at the hard palate — and then doubles the k. Say it as nyak-kā-ri and give the doubled consonant its full length; the metre depends on it.

Radanacchadā hides a sandhi rule worth learning because it is so common. The second element is chada, a cover. After a short vowel, an initial ch is doubled to cch, so radana plus chada gives radanacchada, written रदनच्छदा with c and ch joined. Anywhere in Sanskrit that a word beginning in ch follows a short vowel, expect this.

For the rest of the consonants: padmarāga opens with the cluster dm, dental into labial; śilādarśa has ś at the start and the sequence rś in ādarśa, so the palatal sibilant appears twice with a retroflex-adjacent r between them; and vidruma has dr. The second line is also, incidentally, the first place in the stotra where two words for the same colour sit in the same compound — vidruma and bimba are both simply "red", and hearing them as a pair rather than as two separate comparisons is what makes the line land.

On what to hold while chanting: this is a good verse to notice that the hymn is not naive. It knows the comparisons are worn out, it uses them anyway, and it defeats them on purpose. There is a kind of devotion in that which is quite different from awe.