Safflower on the slope, and a belt that speaks first

Kusumbha is safflower, Carthamus tinctorius, and kausumbha is the adjective from it: dyed with safflower, orange-red. This was the everyday red of Indian dyeing, cheap beside madder or lac, and it gives a brilliant orange-scarlet that no other plant matches. It is also notoriously fugitive. Safflower red fades in light faster than almost any other natural dye, and Monier-Williams records the figurative sense that the fact produced: kusumbha also means outward affection, so called, he says, by comparison with the colour of safflower. The word for the dye became a word for love that washes out. There is no reason at all to think the Vāgdevatās meant a rebuke by it, and the plain sense of the name is simply that her cloth is red. But it is worth knowing that of every red available the poem has chosen the one that does not last, for a goddess whose signature colour is the sky in the few minutes before sunrise.

The doubling of aruṇa is intensive. Sanskrit repeats a word to strengthen it, and the second aruṇa is not a second colour but the same colour insisted on; the alternative reading, which the grammatical note on this name prefers, takes the pair as a comparison, dawn-red set against plain red. Either way the redundancy is deliberate, and by this point in the hymn the reader should be counting. Sindūra and aruṇa in the meditation verses; a thousand rising suns; a flood of red light drowning the world-eggs; the ruby diadem; the ruby mirror; coral and the bimba fruit; and now a red garment described as red twice. At name forty-nine the hymn will give up qualifying and simply call her sarvāruṇā, red throughout.

Kaṭītaṭī is a landscape word attached to a body. Kaṭi is the hip — Monier-Williams also gives, unexpectedly, the entrance of a temple and an elephant's cheek — and taṭī is the feminine of taṭa, a slope, a declivity, a bank. The usage is entirely standard; the same taṭa turns up as stanataṭa, the slope of the breast, in the Saundaryalaharī verse quoted in the previous module. What is not standard is how literally Śaṅkara takes it. In his verse on the same feature, the lord of mountains cuts weight and breadth out of his own slope and settles them on her as a wedding gift, so that the wide heavy sweep of her hips now covers the whole earth over and makes light of it. Her father gave her a piece of himself, and the piece was a hillside.

The word Śaṅkara uses there, nitamba, is itself worth a look, because Monier-Williams gives four senses in a row and they are all in play in this stretch of the hymn: the buttocks, especially of a woman; figuratively, the ridge or side or swell of a mountain and the sloping bank of a river; the shoulder; and — this is the surprise — the sounding-board of a vīṇā. Five verses after the kacchapī lute was shamed into silence, the description has arrived at the part of the body that shares its name with the lute's resonator.

The belt is the more interesting of the two names because it is about being heard. Raśanā is a rope, a rein, a bridle, and a woman's girdle; dāman is a cord; kiṅkiṇikā is a small bell, and the word is simply the noise one makes. So the ornament is a cord slung round the hips with jewelled bells strung on it. Sanskrit poetry cares about this ornament more than about any other, and the reason is acoustic: the girdle is how a woman's approach is known. The Saundaryalaharī's own portrait of this goddess opens on it — before a single feature of her body is named, the first two syllables of the verse are kvaṇat, sounding, and the first thing described is her girdle-cord.

Two pieces of vocabulary carry further than they look. Kāñcī, the commonest ordinary word for this girdle, is glossed by Monier-Williams as a woman's zone furnished with small bells and other ornaments — and then, in the same entry, as the name of one of the seven sacred cities, the Kāñcī of the far south which is among the great seats of this goddess's worship and which the hymn will reach in its own way at name sixty-two. And the hymn comes back to the bells themselves: at name three hundred and twelve she is raṇatkiṅkiṇimekhalā, girdled with ringing bells, the same bells and a different word for the belt, two hundred and seventy names later.

One last observation about where this verse sits. From the eleventh verse to the fifteenth the description has worked down through the mouth, chin, throat, arms, breasts, navel and waist, and everything named has been skin, jewel, flower or thread. This is the hinge at which she is dressed. From here the descent passes over the garment to the thighs, knees, shanks, ankles and feet, and the safflower cloth named here is the last thing the poem interposes between the reciter and her.

The first line is much the harder of the two and all of its difficulty is in the vowels. Aruṇa plus aruṇa gives aruṇāruṇa: the two words have merged at the seam into a single long ā that belongs to neither of them. Written अरुणारुण. Say a-ru-ṇā-ru-ṇa slowly enough to feel that the first ṇ and the second ṇ are the same consonant occurring in two different words, and that the long vowel in the middle is the join. Both ṇ are retroflex, and this is the drill the pilot set at sindūrāruṇa in the first meditation verse, now doubled and with nothing else in the line to hide behind.

Kausumbha shows a piece of derivation you have already met once. The vowel-strengthening called vṛddhi turns the u of kusumbha into au, exactly as it turned the u of sugandha into saugandhika in the fourth verse and turns sundara into saundarya in the title of Śaṅkara's poem. Then mbh: a labial nasal running into an aspirated labial, and the aspiration must be released rather than swallowed.

Vastra gives you str, three consonants with one vowel among them, all dental or near it. Bhāsvat is the hymn's eighth compound-final present participle in -at — after udyat, majjat, lasat, kanat, vibhrājat, calat and dalat — and here it runs straight into a k: bhāsvatkaṭītaṭī, an unvoiced dental t immediately followed by an unvoiced velar k. The t will vanish if you let it. Release it.

The line then ends on a small drumming figure that is one of the pleasures of the verse: ka-ṭī-ta-ṭī, two retroflex ṭ, two long ī, and a short a in between them. Curl the tongue back for both and let the two long vowels ring.

The second line is easier and mostly nasal. Kiṅkiṇikā puts a guttural ṅ before k and then a retroflex ṇ, so within four syllables the tongue makes a nasal at the velum and then a nasal with the tip curled right back: kiṅ-ki-ṇi-kā. It is a good, short exercise in the fact that Sanskrit has five distinct nasals and expects all of them.

Raśanā has the palatal ś; keep it distinct from the dental s of kausumbha and vastra in the line above. Dāman appears as dāma-, having lost its final n inside the compound, exactly as preman did in the previous verse — the second instance in two verses of the same habit, which makes this a good moment to fix it.

Both caesurae are well behaved and fall at joints: aruṇāruṇakausumbha, then vastrabhāsvatkaṭītaṭī; ratnakiṅkiṇikāramya, then raśanādāmabhūṣitā.

One word to enjoy rather than to drill: ramya, delightful. It is a gerundive from √ram, to take pleasure, so it means to-be-enjoyed, in the same way that kamanīya in the thirteenth verse meant to-be-desired. Monier-Williams also records ramya as a name for the campaka tree, which has been in this hymn twice already.

For the archanā, aruṇāruṇakausumbhavastrabhāsvatkaṭītaṭyai namaḥ and ratnakiṅkiṇikāramyaraśanādāmabhūṣitāyai namaḥ. Note that the ī-stem taṭī contracts to taṭyai while the ā-stem takes the full -āyai, which is the same contrast the eleventh verse offered.

On what to hold: the verse conveniently divides the attention between two senses, and the order it puts them in is the wrong way round on purpose. Read the line about colour first, as written. Then notice that in any actual encounter the bells would have been heard from the next room, before there was anything at all to look at.