A waist arrived at by argument

The thin waist is the oldest and most worn of all the conventions of Sanskrit description, and by itself it would be worth no comment. What is not conventional is the vocabulary this name reaches for. Lakṣya is what is perceptible, what can be marked or observed; ādhāratā is an abstract noun meaning the condition of being a support; samunneya is what is to be inferred or deduced. Not one of these belongs to poetry. They belong to the vocabulary of Indian logic, where the standing example of a valid inference is the fire on the mountain deduced from the smoke above it. The Vāgdevatās have dropped a small piece of Nyāya into a love poem and produced a name that has to be reasoned through rather than looked at.

Śaṅkara asks the same question — what is it that is actually visible at her waist? — and gives an answer stranger than any inference. It is the sky. Space got in between her two jar-like breasts, was thinned to a thread by their pressing against one another, and is now going into the cavern of her navel; and that thread of squeezed sky, dark and shaped like the very finest ripple on the Yamunā, is what discerning eyes make out at her middle. Both poets agree that there is nothing there. One says: therefore reason to it. The other says: therefore what you are seeing is the sky.

The three folds have a name of their own in the language. Monier-Williams enters trivali as a word and glosses it, drily, as the three folds over a woman's navel, regarded as a beauty. It is standard descriptive furniture. What this name does with it is not standard, because it makes the folds functional: they are a paṭṭabandha, and the middle would give way without them.

Paṭṭa is the item to look up. The dictionary gives it as a slab or tablet; as the copper plate on which a royal grant is inscribed; as the flat surface of anything; as a bandage, ligature, strip or fillet of cloth; and then as a frontlet or turban, of which it specifies five kinds — those of kings, of queens, of princes, of generals, and the turban of honour. So one word covers a surgical dressing and a crown-cloth. Paṭṭabandha is accordingly both the tying on of a bandage and the tying on of a diadem, and the ceremony by which a king is installed is a paṭṭābhiṣeka — which is one of the events Agastya lists in the frame narrative of this stotra among the things he has already been taught, and which lies behind the third name of the hymn, mistress of the splendid lion-throne. The folds that are splinting her waist are wearing the same word as her coronation.

Śaṅkara makes the same observation without the pun and with a good deal more anxiety. Her waist, he says, is thin by nature, worn out by the weight of the slopes of her breasts, bowed under it, seeming to give way little by little; its steadiness is the steadiness of a tree left standing on a riverbank after the bank has gone. And then, in the last words of the verse, he does something a hymn of praise is not supposed to do: he wishes it well. May it long be safe. It is one of the few places in the poem where the speaker stops admiring and starts worrying.

His next verse supplies the agent that the sahasranāma leaves out. The breasts split the bodice moulded on them and chafe at the roots of her arms; the bodiless god, judging that this was quite enough to break her waist, has bound it in three places to save it, as one ties lengths of lavalī creeper round something. So the trivali is a splint, and the person who applied it is Kāma — which returns the whole image to the inventory of his equipment that the second and third verses of this hymn put in her hands.

One structural point, so that the sequence does not seem disordered. Verse fourteen named her breasts twice, this verse names them again in the first element of its second name, and the description has now circled the same region of the body for three names running. That is normal for the form; the middle of the body is where these poems always slow down most. The descent resumes in earnest at the next verse, when she is finally dressed.

Two sixteen-syllable names, and for the first time in several verses one of the caesurae is awkward. Count eight in the first line and you land inside a word: lakṣyaromalatādhā | ratāsamunneyamadhyamā. The pause falls between dhā and ra, in the middle of ādhāratā. Hear the break without opening a gap in the sound, exactly as the pilot advised for the fourth meditation verse. The second line behaves: stanabhāradalanmadhya, then paṭṭabandhavalitrayā, and the break is at a joint.

Lakṣya opens on kṣ, which you met at ikṣu in the third verse: an unvoiced velar k running straight into the retroflex sibilant ṣ, and never the English x. Then y. Lak-ṣya.

Ādhāratā is worth taking apart, because the suffix is what turns this name into an argument. Sanskrit makes abstract nouns freely with -tā and -tva, exactly as English makes them with -ness and -ity. Ādhāra is a support; ādhāratā is the state of being a support. So the compound says that her waist is to be inferred from the visible line of down's being supported by something. Remove the two syllables of -tā and you have a picture; leave them in and you have a premise.

Samunneya is sam plus ud plus the root nī with the gerundive ending -ya, and the d of ud has assimilated forward to give a doubled n. Written समुन्नेय. Both n must be heard, and the metre requires the first syllable to be heavy on the strength of them: sa-mun-ne-ya.

The second line gives you the seventh or eighth compound-final present participle of the hymn, and this one is disguised. Dalat, splitting, has run into madhya, and its final t has assimilated to the following m to become n: dalanmadhya. That is the same change you saw at calanmīna in the sixth verse. Once you know to look for it, an -an- in front of a nasal is very often a hidden -at.

Paṭṭa is the single hardest sound in the verse and the only retroflex in it. A doubled retroflex ṭ: the tongue-tip curls back, makes the closure, holds it, and releases into the second. There is no forward movement in between, and the doubling must be audible or the syllable will not be heavy. Everything else in the line — stana, bhāra, dalan, madhya, bandha, vali, traya — is dental or labial, so the tongue is forward throughout and curls back exactly once. Practising the line for that one contrast is a better use of two minutes than practising it for speed.

Bandha has an aspirated dh after a dental n; give the breath its own release. Valitrayā ends the line on three light syllables and a long one, which lets the verse land softly after a heavy middle.

One merger to reconstruct: latā plus ādhāratā gives latādhāratā, with two long ā swallowing each other into one and no trace of it in either script.

For the archanā, lakṣyaromalatādhāratāsamunneyamadhyamāyai namaḥ and stanabhāradalanmadhyapaṭṭabandhavalitrayāyai namaḥ. The second is one of the longest datives in the first hundred names and worth saying slowly once on its own.

On what to hold: this verse offers a contemplative instruction more precise than most. Take the first name exactly as it is constructed. You cannot see the thing itself. You can see what it holds up. Therefore it is there. That is the shape of every inference anyone has ever made about the subject of this hymn, and the Vāgdevatās have written it into a description of a waist.