Gold on the arms, pearls at the throat

Aṅgada and keyūra are both glossed by Monier-Williams as a bracelet worn on the upper arm, in almost the same words, and putting the two together in one compound is the ordinary Sanskrit way of saying that she is wearing a full set — as English might say rings and bracelets without meaning to draw a line between them. Where the two are distinguished in practice, keyūra is generally the band worn high, above the elbow, and aṅgada the one on the arm below it, but usage varies between texts and between regions, and it would be an overstatement to say the compound is being precise. What is precise is the metal. Kanaka is gold, and this is the first metal named anywhere in the description. Everything up to now has been stone, flower, light or thread.

The arms have been counted once already. The sixth name of the hymn was cāturbāhusamanvitā, endowed with four arms, and it used the same participle in a slightly longer form. That was arithmetic; this is dressing. Between the two lies everything the hands were shown holding — the noose, the goad, the sugarcane bow, the five arrows — so by the time the hymn puts gold on those arms the reader knows what they are for.

Śaṅkara gives the four arms a verse of their own and finds an unexpected reason to care about the number. Brahmā, who is lotus-born and has four faces, praises her four arms with all four mouths at once — and the reason he is so anxious to do it is that Śiva once tore off his fifth head with a fingernail. Terrified of those nails ever since, he wants a gesture of protection extended to each remaining head simultaneously, and he thinks flattery of exactly the right number of arms may procure it. It is a joke, and it is also a demonstration of how completely the tradition assumes that the count of her limbs is a live theological quantity rather than an artistic convention.

Graiveya, the word for the necklace, is built on grīvā, the throat. Monier-Williams gives it as a necklace and then, in the neuter and masculine, as a chain worn round the neck of an elephant. The overlap is not a pun the verse is making, but it is a fair reminder that this vocabulary is not sentimental about the difference between adorning a woman and harnessing an animal, and that both meanings are about weight hung from a neck. Elephants will be along in due course, at name sixty-six.

Cintāka, the pendant, is a genuine gap. It is not a headword in Monier-Williams at all. The sense given here — a drop or ornament hung from the middle of a necklace — is what the context requires and what the commentators supply, and it is the sense the word carries in the ornament lists of this kind of literature; but a student working from the dictionary alone will find nothing, exactly as with cillikā in the sixth verse. Note in passing that the same first element turns up later in the hymn in a much more famous compound, cintāmaṇigṛha, the house built of the wish-granting stone, at name fifty-seven. Whether the pendant is being named for the stone or the stone for the shape of a pendant is not something the text answers.

Lola, the word for the way the pearls hang, is one of the more interesting adjectives in this stotra. Monier-Williams gives moving hither and thither, shaking, rolling, tossing, dangling, swinging, agitated, unsteady, restless — and then, in a second block of senses, changeable, transient, fickle, and then desirous, greedy. It is the standard epithet of a beautiful woman's eyes and the standard epithet of Lakṣmī, who never stays. Applied to pearls on a string it means nothing more than swinging, but the word arrives carrying its other lives.

Muktā, the pearl, is the best single word in the verse. Monier-Williams defines it as a pearl, and then explains the derivation in a parenthesis: as loosened from the pearl-oyster shell. It is the past participle of √muc, to release — the same root that gives mukti, liberation. A pearl in Sanskrit is a released thing, and a hymn that will end with a promise of release has hung a string of them at her throat.

Śaṅkara's verse on the necklace supplies the mythology behind the pearls and one of his best conceits. The pearls, he says, began from the frontal bosses of the elephant demon — an allusion to the belief, set out in the gemmological chapters of Varāhamihira's Bṛhat Saṃhitā, that pearls are found not only in oysters but in elephants, conches, clouds, bamboo, snakes, fish and boars, with the elephant pearl the rarest and finest. Those white pearls then take on a mottling from within, because the red of her lips is reflected in them, and so the whole necklace comes to look like the fame of the destroyer of the three cities, shot through with the red of his valour. Fame in Sanskrit poetry is white and valour is red, and the necklace has become a diagram of her husband's reputation.

Both names run to sixteen syllables and both end in -ānvitā, so the verse is audibly a couplet. Anvita is anu plus the past participle of √i, to go: gone along with, accompanied by, endowed with. Say an-vi-tā and let the nv be two distinct consonants; English tends to nasalize through it.

The first line opens on a sandhi you cannot hear and can barely see. Kanaka plus aṅgada gives kanakāṅgada: a short a and a short a have merged into one long ā, written with a single ा, and the seam is gone. This is the same merger as campakāśoka in the fourth verse and nijāruṇa in the third. It is the commonest sandhi in the hymn and the commonest cause of mis-parsing a long name.

Keyūra needs a long e. Sanskrit has no short e; the vowels e and o are always long, being contractions of a plus i and a plus u. Learners who come to the language through modern Indian pronunciations tend to clip it, and the metre will not allow that. Ke-yū-ra, with the ū long as well.

Kamanīya rewards a moment. It is a gerundive from √kam, to desire — the same root as kāma — so what it says is not lovely but to-be-desired. The suffix -anīya is one of the two ways Sanskrit forms a gerundive, and once you can hear it you will find it all over the literature. The arms are not described as beautiful; they are described as things that ought to be wanted.

In the second line, ratna gives you tn, a dental stop running into a dental nasal with no movement of the tongue at all — one of the easiest clusters in the language and one of the most often fumbled, because English has no word with that sequence inside a syllable. Graiveya opens with gr and then the diphthong ai, which is long: grai-ve-ya. Muktāphala has the kt cluster and then ph, which is an aspirated p and never the English f; let the p close and the breath follow, as in sphurat in the meditation verses.

Both caesurae fall cleanly at the eighth syllable and both fall inside a compound rather than between its members: kanakāṅgadakeyūra breaks after keyūra, which is a joint, but ratnagraiveyacintāka breaks after cintāka, which is also a joint. The verse is unusually well behaved.

There is one nāmāvalī slip worth knowing about, because it is the sort of thing that makes a learner doubt his own reading. The dative form printed with this recension for the thirty-first name reads kanakāṅgadakeyūrakamanīyamujānvitāyai, with muja for bhuja. The stotra line has bhuja, arm, which is the only form that makes sense. Copyists drop aspirates.

For the archanā the two names are kanakāṅgadakeyūrakamanīyabhujānvitāyai namaḥ and ratnagraiveyacintākalolamuktāphalānvitāyai namaḥ. Said one after the other they are almost the same length and end identically, which is the point at which the rhyme in the stotra becomes impossible to miss.

On what to hold: there is no argument in this verse and no comparison to work out, and the temptation is therefore to hurry it. Resist that. What the hymn is doing here is the oldest thing a devotional description does — counting the wealth of the person being described, item by item, because counting is a form of attention. Take the gold, then the pendant, then the pearls, and let the pearls swing.