The chin no one has matched, and a knotted thread

Start with the spelling of the chin, because it is a small lesson in how this vocabulary behaves. Monier-Williams's headword is cubuka, and he records cibuka and chubuka as the same word. The stotra uses cibuka; Śaṅkara, in the verse that covers the same feature, uses cubuka. Neither is a mistake. The word simply wobbles in its first vowel across the tradition, as a handful of body-part words do, and a reader who looks for cibuka in the dictionary will be sent to cubuka. Worth knowing before it happens.

What Śaṅkara does with the chin is instructive precisely because he ends where the sahasranāma begins. His last word is aupamyarahitam, devoid of comparison — the same verdict as anākalitasādṛśya. But he spends the three lines before it describing the chin anyway, and he does it entirely through what has been done to it rather than what it looks like. Her father the snow mountain touches it with his fingertips out of fondness. Her husband tips it up, again and again, impatient to drink from her lip. And it is the handle of a mirror: Sanskrit hand-mirrors were polished metal discs with a stem to hold them by, so calling her chin the stem of a mirror makes her face the disc and makes Śiva the one looking into it. Three actions and one metaphor, and then the confession that none of it amounts to a comparison. The stotra keeps only the confession.

The second name is one of the clearest regional fingerprints in the whole hymn. A māṅgalyasūtra is the auspicious cord tied round the bride's neck by the groom — the tāli of Tamil and Malayalam usage, the maṅgalasūtra of Marathi and Kannada. It is not a Vedic rite. The classical wedding ceremony described in the gṛhya literature has the taking of the hand, the seven steps and the mounting of the stone, and no thread of this kind; the tying of the tāli is a later and largely southern and western custom that the stotra treats as simply what happens at a wedding. Together with the Gopura-crowned city that this hymn will describe at name fifty-six, and the temple-shaped ornaments and southern flowers scattered through it, this name is part of the evidence that places the text's composition in the south.

It also settles a debt the hymn incurred six verses ago. Name twenty-five called her face the wedding house of Love and made her eyebrows the toraṇa flung over its doorway, using the word māṅgalya for the occasion. Five names later the same word returns, and now the wedding announced over the door has been performed and there is a knot at the throat to prove it. The hymn is not repeating an image; it is finishing a sentence.

Śaṅkara's verse on the throat makes the connection explicit in a way the compressed name cannot. He looks at the three fine lines that run across her neck and calls them pratibhū — a legal word, meaning a surety, one who stands guarantor for another's obligation — for the number of well-twisted strands bound on at her wedding. Three lines, three strands, and the throat itself keeps the record. Then, in the same breath, he reads the three lines a second time as the boundary markers that fix the standing of the three grāmas, the three basic scale-systems of classical Indian music. The one throat is at once a marriage register and a musical instrument, which is exactly the pair of things the previous verse of this hymn was talking about.

A final caution about a word. Kandharā, the neck, is not a headword in Monier-Williams under that spelling; he has kaṃdhara, and he derives it from kam, the head, plus dhara from √dhṛ, to hold — so it means the head-holder. That etymology is worth carrying while you chant the name, because the thing this head-holder is described as holding is not the head but a thread that somebody else put there. The dictionary also records kaṃdhara as a word for a cloud, on the other sense of kam, water; nothing in the verse needs that, but it is the kind of thing that turns up when you look.

There is one theological point that the tradition never fails to draw. Every ornament described in the last nine verses has been shown to derive its value from her: the flowers borrow her fragrance, the stars turn themselves into rubies to be in her crown, the coral and the bimba lose. The thread is the exception. It came from outside her, it was tied by someone else, and it is the one item the hymn names its donor for. That the marriage cord of a goddess whose husband cannot die is a permanent object is the plain sense the tradition takes from the name.

Two sixteen-syllable names, one per line, with clean caesurae again: anākalitasādṛśya, then cibukaśrīvirājitā; kāmeśabaddhamāṅgalya, then sūtraśobhitakandharā.

The first word teaches a rule that will save you elsewhere. The negative prefix is a- before a consonant and an- before a vowel, so a-kalita but an-ākalita — precisely as Greek has a-theos and an-arkhos. Say a-nā-ka-li-ta and hear the n as the joint, not as part of the stem. The stem is ākalita, from ā plus √kal, to reckon or make out; anākalita is what has not been reckoned.

Sādṛśya contains the syllabic ṛ inside a conjunct, dṛ, and then the cluster śya. Take it as sā-dṛ-śya, with the ṛ short — one beat, tongue in the retroflex position — and with the ś of śya made at the hard palate along with the y that follows it. That is the third syllabic ṛ you have met, after mṛganābhi in verse five and gṛha in verse six.

The second line opens with a piece of Sanskrit spelling worth stopping for. Baddha is written बद्ध: an unaspirated d followed by an aspirated dh. Sanskrit does not double an aspirate. When a rule calls for a doubled aspirated consonant, the first copy loses its breath, so bh becomes b-bh, dh becomes d-dh, kh becomes k-kh. You will meet this everywhere once you can see it. Say bad-dha, closing the first d fully before releasing the aspiration on the second.

Māṅgalya gives you ṅg, the guttural nasal made at the same place as the g that follows, and then the cluster ly — you met both in māṅgalya at verse six, so this is the second run at the same word. Sūtra needs a long ū and then the cluster tr with a dental t. Śobhita has the palatal ś at the head and an aspirated bh in the middle; keep the aspiration.

The sibilants in this verse are a good short drill because they are all one kind. Sādṛśya, śrī, śobhita: the first s in sādṛśya is dental, the ś in the same word is palatal, and śrī and śobhita are palatal. There is no retroflex ṣ anywhere in the verse. Chanting it slowly with attention to that one contrast, dental s against palatal ś, is worth doing twice.

One sandhi is invisible in both scripts and must be reconstructed. Cibuka plus śrī gives cibukaśrī with nothing hidden, but virājitā at the end of the first name and anvitā-type endings elsewhere in the hymn are all past participles doing the same job: made resplendent by. Virājita is vi plus √rāj, to shine, in the past participle, and the vi- intensifies. Hearing it as a participle rather than as part of the noun makes the whole sixteen syllables resolve into a subject and a predicate.

For the archanā, the datives are anākalitasādṛśyacibukaśrīvirājitāyai namaḥ and kāmeśabaddhamāṅgalyasūtraśobhitakandharāyai namaḥ — both plain ā-stems, both taking -āyai, and the second of them is one of the longest single words you will be asked to say in the fourth case anywhere in the hymn.

On what to hold: the two names are a matched pair about the limits of description. The first says that a chin defeated every poet who tried it. The second says that the most important thing on her body is a piece of thread, and describes it exactly. The counsel implied is not to assume that the grand things are the ones that matter.