The lute silenced, and a mind gone under

Kacchapī is a female tortoise. Monier-Williams gives that sense first and then adds the second: a kind of lute, so named because it is shaped like a tortoise, and he cross-refers to the Latin testudo — the shell-bodied instrument of the classical Mediterranean, the Greek chelys, which was made from a real tortoise. The dictionary is pointing at a coincidence between two unrelated musical traditions, and it happens to be exactly right about why the Sanskrit word exists: the resonator is a curved bowl. In the Indian tradition Kacchapī is the proper name of Sarasvatī's instrument, as Mahatī is the name of Nārada's. So the first name of this verse is not comparing her speech to a lute in general. It is naming a specific instrument belonging to a specific goddess and saying that this goddess's small talk defeats it.

Śaṅkara stages the whole scene, and reading his verse beside the name is the quickest way to see what the sixteen syllables are compressing. Sarasvatī is singing Śiva's exploits to her lute. Devī begins to say something appreciative and moves her head as she says it. That is all: one word of praise, offered in passing. And the sweetness of it so contradicts the delicate ringing of the strings that Vāṇī, without a word, slips the cloth cover back over her vīṇā and puts it away. Nothing is announced and nobody is humiliated in public. The Vāgdevatās fold that into a single participle.

That participle is worth pressing on. Vinirbhartsita is built on the causative of a root that means to threaten, to scold, to revile — Monier-Williams glosses the related noun bhartsana as threatening, menace, curse — and it is armed with two prefixes, vi and nis, which push it to an extreme. So the lute has not merely been surpassed. It has been shouted down. The two names of the ninth verse defeated coral and the bimba fruit, but those were fruit and stone; this is the first time the losing party in one of these contests is a person, and the verb has become correspondingly harsh. There is a small joke in that harshness, since what does the shouting down is the gentlest sound in the poem.

The second half returns to a construction the hymn used twenty-two names ago and repeats it almost exactly. The sixth name was nijāruṇaprabhāpūramajjadbrahmāṇḍamaṇḍalā: her own light, prabhā, in flood, pūra, with the world-eggs majjat, drowning in it. Here it is mandasmitaprabhāpūramajjatkāmeśamānasā: the light of her faint smile, in flood, with Kāmeśa's mind drowning in it. Same noun, same noun, same present participle, in the same order and the same metrical position. This is self-quotation across a distance, and the substitution at the end is the whole point. What went under the first time was the entire ring of world-eggs. What goes under this time is one mind. The scale shrinks and the claim grows, because of whose mind it is.

Kāmeśa, lord of desire, is Śiva under the name this tradition prefers for him, and nāma 28 is the first place in the whole text — meditation verses included — where the consort is named at all. He arrives already submerged. That is not accidental placement. The first verse of the Saundaryalaharī states the doctrine flatly: joined with Śakti, Śiva can act; without her he cannot stir. The stotra makes the same point without arguing it, by choosing the moment of his first appearance to describe him as unconscious in her light.

One small thing the vocabulary allows, which may or may not have been meant. Mānasa is an ordinary word for the mind, and Monier-Williams also records it as the name of the lake Mānasa in the Himālaya, the water the wild geese are supposed to fly to. Kāmeśamānasa can be heard, without any violence to the grammar, as Kāmeśa's lake — which is a convenient thing to be drowning in. The hymn does not say this. The language makes it available.

Two sixteen-syllable names, one to a line, and for once both caesurae fall in a helpful place. Count eight in the first line and you land exactly at the end of mādhurya: nijasallāpamādhurya, then vinirbhartsitakacchapī. Count eight in the second and you land at the end of pūra: mandasmitaprabhāpūra, then majjatkāmeśamānasā. In both cases the break in the metre is also a break in the compound, so the natural breath and the natural sense agree. That is not always true in this hymn and it is worth enjoying when it happens.

Sallāpa hides a rule. The underlying form is saṃlāpa, from sam plus √lap, to talk; the nasal has assimilated forward into the l and doubled it. Monier-Williams is severe about it and files sallāpa as a wrong reading for saṃlāpa, but the doubled form is thoroughly current and it is what the stotra has. Say sal-lā-pa with the l held long enough to be counted twice, because the metre counts the first syllable heavy on the strength of it.

Vinirbhartsita is the hardest word in the verse and probably in the last five. Break it vi-nir-bhart-si-ta. The r of nir survives before a voiced consonant instead of becoming a visarga, so you get r running directly into the aspirated bh: let the breath be heard. Then bhart-si gives you r, an unaspirated dental t and a dental s in immediate succession, which is a sequence English never asks for. Slow it to three separate gestures and then close the gap. Note in passing that the nāmāvalī printed with this recension writes the dative as vinirbhatsitakacchapyai, without the r; the stotra line has it, and it belongs there.

Kacchapī gives you the cch you met at radanacchadā in the ninth verse, but this time it is inside the stem rather than at a junction between words. Give the first c a clean closure before the aspirated ch, and keep both of them as affricates made at the hard palate, never as the k sound English would supply.

The second line is easier but has two places to lose. Majjat is the doubled palatal you have now met three times — ujjvalā at the end of verse two, majjat in verse three, ujjvalā again at the end of verse ten — and it must be heard as two j sounds. Immediately after it comes a t running into a k in majjatkāmeśa: both unvoiced, both stops, and the temptation is to swallow the t. Release it.

Vowel lengths carry the sense here. Nija is two short syllables and means one's own, innate; if you lengthen it, it becomes nothing. Mādhurya and kacchapī both end long. In the second line, manda, smita and majjat are all short and quick, and then prabhā, pūra, kāmeśa and mānasā open out into long vowels one after another — which is a fair imitation of a flood.

For the recitation as archanā, the two names take the dative in -yai: nijasallāpamādhuryavinirbhartsitakacchapyai namaḥ, mandasmitaprabhāpūramajjatkāmeśamānasāyai namaḥ. Notice that the ī-stem contracts to -yai while the ā-stem keeps a syllable and gives -āyai. Saying the two one after the other is the cleanest short lesson in feminine datives the hymn offers.

As for what to hold: this is the verse in which the poem stops looking and starts listening. The instruction it implies is unusually concrete. Attend to the fact that what defeated the best music available was not a performance but a passing remark, and that what put the god of desire out of his mind was not a display but a slight smile. Nothing in this verse is done on purpose.