A stake laid down, and a creeper in the garden

Pratipaṇa comes from gambling. Monier-Williams gives it as the stake of an adversary at play, and then, on the other derivation, as barter or exchange; the underlying paṇa is a bet, the sum played for, and also a copper weight used as coin. So the name has been built out of the vocabulary of the gaming board and the market stall, which is not where a hymn of this kind usually shops. What the word insists on is parity. A counter-stake is by definition equal in value to what it answers, or the wager will not stand. Kāmeśvara's love is called a ratna and a maṇi, a jewel; she does not receive it, she matches it.

That is worth holding against the ordinary run of Sanskrit love poetry, where a woman's body is what a man pays for or dies for. Here it is what she pays with, and she is the party setting the terms. The name also follows directly on from the marriage cord of the previous verse, which makes the sequence look deliberate: a contract was tied at the throat, and this is the consideration.

The second name changes register completely and becomes technical in a different field. Ālavāla is not a poetic word. Monier-Williams gives it one sense and one only — a basin for water round the root of a tree — and it belongs beside parivāha in the sixth verse, the overflow channel of an irrigation tank. This hymn keeps reaching for the vocabulary of water management on land, and both times the effect is the same: the image stops being decorative and becomes something a person could actually dig.

Śaṅkara's verse on the navel makes the identical identification and then extends it into a list of five. Her navel is a whirlpool of the Ganges standing still; it is the basin at the root of the creeper of her line of down, with her breasts for its buds; it is the fire-pit for the flame that is the heat of the flower-arrowed god; it is Rati's pleasure-house; and it is the mouth of the cave in which Śiva's eyes reach their perfection. One word differs from the sahasranāma and the difference is the whole of the poetry. Śaṅkara says mukula, bud; this hymn says phala, fruit. Same plant, two moments in its year. A bud is a promise, and fruit is what a creeper is for.

The fire-pit in the middle of that list deserves a moment. Śaṅkara calls the navel a kuṇḍa, which is the word the fourth name of this stotra used when it said she came up out of a cidagnikuṇḍa, a fire-pit made of awareness. In his verse the fire in the pit is Kāma's heat; in the fourth name it is consciousness. The same vessel with a different fuel, and the whole narrative the hymn sits inside was set going by what happened when Kāma's fire and Śiva's fire were brought together.

Śaṅkara also gives the line of down an origin myth, and it is the darkest of his conceits about her body. Kāma, his body licked over by the ranks of flame that were Śiva's anger, plunged into the deep pool of her navel; and the thin line of smoke that rose out of it afterwards is what people take for her romāvali. That is the burning of the god of desire — the event that produces the ash out of which Bhaṇḍāsura is fashioned, which is why she rose from the fire in the fourth name of this hymn — relocated onto her body as a line of hair. The creeper in the garden and the smoke from a cremation are the same line, described by two poets who both knew the story.

One grammatical detail that changes how the verse sounds. Both names here end in long ī rather than the long ā that closes almost everything else in the hymn: stanī and kucadvayī. They are bahuvrīhi compounds whose final members, stana and dvaya, have been given the feminine ī when made to agree with her. Nothing doctrinal follows from it, but the ear notices, and it is the same shift that produced kacchapī three verses ago and will produce jaṅghikā two verses on.

Two sixteen-syllable names again, and both caesurae fall at a joint in the compound: kāmeśvarapremaratna, then maṇipratipaṇastanī; nābhyālavālaromāli, then latāphalakucadvayī.

The consort is named for the third time in four verses and this is the long form. Kāmeśa at names 28 and 30, kāmeśvara here, kāmeśa again at 39. It is the same god and the choice is metrical: kāma plus īśa, kāma plus īśvara, each compressing by the same merger of a and ī into e. Two invisible seams, and worth undoing once out loud — kāma-īśvara — so that the name does not become a single opaque block.

Prema is not a stem in its own right. The dictionary form is preman, a neuter noun in -an, and it drops its final n inside a compound exactly as paribhāvin and samākarṣin did in the ninth and tenth verses, and as dāman will in the very next verse. Collect these: the loss of a final n in compound is one of the three or four habits that account for most of the odd-looking word-shapes in this hymn.

Pratipaṇa contains the best single piece of phonetics in the verse. Its ṇ is retroflex, and it is retroflex because of the r in prati — the ṇatva rule the pilot pointed out at ābharaṇa in the seventh verse. Here the r and the ṇ are separated by two whole syllables and the rule still reaches across them. That reach is exactly what makes the rule remarkable, and hearing it work at this distance is more instructive than any statement of it. Say pra-ti-pa-ṇa with a genuine curl on the last consonant.

The second line opens on a kind of sandhi you have not met yet in this hymn. Nābhi plus ālavāla does not merge into a long vowel; the i of nābhi turns into the consonant y, giving nābhyālavāla, written नाभ्यालवाल with the bh carrying a y underneath. Sanskrit does this whenever i or u meets a dissimilar vowel: i becomes y, u becomes v. Undoing it is how you find nābhi in the dictionary, and it is a good deal harder to spot than the a plus a mergers you are used to by now.

Romāli hides two things at once. Roman, the hair of the body, has lost its final n, and the resulting romā has merged with the ā of āli, a row. So romāli is roman plus āli with two operations applied in sequence, and neither is visible.

After that the line lets go: latā, phala, kuca, dvayī are all short, open and easy, and the only care needed is on dvayī, where the dv is a dental d followed by a labiodental v and both must be heard. English speakers reduce it to one or the other.

There is almost no retroflex traffic in this verse — the ṇ of pratipaṇa and nothing else — which after several verses of heavy ṭ and ḍ and ṇ is itself worth noticing. The tongue stays forward. Let it.

For the archanā, the datives are kāmeśvarapremaratnamaṇipratipaṇastanyai namaḥ and nābhyālavālaromālilatāphalakucadvayyai namaḥ. Both are ī-stems, and the second gives you a doubled y in the ending, dvay-yai, which is unusual enough that reciters often smooth it away.

On what to hold: the two names give two incompatible accounts of one thing, and the hymn does not reconcile them. In the first, nothing is given away and nothing is received; a price is met exactly. In the second, nothing is bought at all; something was planted, watered and left alone, and in due course it bore. Chanting them in succession without deciding between them is the discipline this poem asks for over and over.