The portrait reaches the feet, and beauty is named at its source

The long stretch of the sahasranāma that precedes this verse is a keśādi-pādānta varṇana, a description running from the hair down to the feet, and this is where it ends. The convention is old and pervasive in Sanskrit devotional poetry: the deity is contemplated limb by limb in a fixed downward order, so that the mind is given somewhere definite to go and cannot wander off. What the order accomplishes at the end is a kind of arrival. The meditation begins where the worshipper cannot reach and finishes where he can, at the feet, which is also where his head goes when he prostrates. In Śrīvidyā the point is made explicit by the pādukā, the sandal: the initiate receives a pādukā-mantra naming the feet of the teacher, and ritual sequences are begun by invoking it. Feet in this tradition are not a modest afterthought to a portrait; they are the joint at which the divine and the human are in actual contact.

Mañjīra is one of several Sanskrit words for the anklet — nūpura is the commonest — and it names specifically the hollow ornament with beads or pellets inside that sounds as the wearer moves. Śiñjāna is the present participle of the root śiñj, to jingle or tinkle, a verb that exists almost entirely to describe this sound and the twang of a bowstring. Editions and manuscripts differ over whether the name opens with the palatal sibilant, śiñjāna, or the dental, siñjāna; the two spellings are both current, and this repository's own text of the verse line and its text of the name happen to disagree, which is a fair sample of the state of the tradition. Nothing doctrinal turns on it, but a reciter following one printed text alongside a chanter following another will notice at once. Poetically the anklet does something no other ornament does: it makes the wearer audible before she is visible. Sanskrit poets use the detail constantly for a woman's approach in darkness, and the devotional application follows without strain — she is heard first. Commentators who read the hymn through the vocabulary of subtle sound take the tinkling as an image of nāda, the unstruck resonance at the base of speech; others take it as jewellery on a body, and the verse supports both.

Marālī is the feminine of marāla, a word used both for the swan and for the flamingo and effectively interchangeable in poetry with haṃsa. Comparing a woman's walk to a swan's is one of the fixed similes of the literature, standing alongside the comparison to an elephant's gait; what the two have in common is deliberateness, weight carried without visible effort, a refusal to hurry. But the swan brings a heavier load of meaning with it. In the Upaniṣadic and later literature the haṃsa is the emblem of discrimination, on the strength of the belief that it can drink the milk out of a mixture of milk and water and leave the water behind — which is why paramahaṃsa became the title of the renunciate who has separated the real from the apparent. The syllables of the word are also read as the breath itself, and reversed they give so'ham, "I am that." A name that says she moves like a swan is therefore saying something, for a reader inside the tradition, about the rhythm of breathing as well as about a queen crossing a floor.

Lāvaṇya, the operative word in the last name, is built from lavaṇa, salt, and means literally saltiness or savour. Sanskrit aesthetics distinguishes it sharply from rūpa, which is form or shape: the handbooks define lāvaṇya as the shimmer that appears within well-made limbs the way light appears to move inside a pearl — not the proportions themselves but the lustre that inhabits them. It is the part of beauty that cannot be specified, and calling her its treasury rather than its possessor is a strong claim, since it makes every individual beautiful thing a withdrawal from a store that is hers. Śevadhi is an old word, at home in Vedic and epic Sanskrit, for a hoard of buried treasure — what a king keeps rather than what he spends. It is grammatically masculine and it stays masculine here even though it describes the goddess, which is why the nāmāvalī form is mahālāvaṇyaśevadhaye rather than the -āyai the neighbouring names take.

The first name occupies the entire opening line and is among the longest in the stotra. Attempted whole, it defeats most beginners; the way through is to learn it as four pieces that are individually easy — śiñjāna, maṇimañjīra, maṇḍita, śrīpadāmbujā, that is tinkling, jewelled-anklet, adorned, blessed-lotus-feet. Secure each one separately, then run them together with no gap at all, since the whole thing is a single word and a breath inside it is an error.

The line is a drill in nasals, and that is not accidental; it is what makes it sound like jingling. The palatal ñ appears twice, in ñjā and ñjī, the retroflex ṇ three times, the dental n once, the labial m repeatedly. The palatal cluster ñj is what English speakers get wrong. It is near the middle of "banjo", but the tongue must lie flat against the hard palate for both consonants rather than touching the ridge behind the teeth. The retroflex ṇḍ of maṇḍita wants the tongue tip curled back to the roof of the mouth for both sounds. If the ṇ of maṇi and maṇḍita comes out as an English n, the line loses the alternation of dark and bright nasals on which its effect depends.

Śrī in śrīpadāmbujā is one syllable and not two: palatal ś, then r, then long ī, with nothing inserted between the consonants. The half-verse ends on °ambujā with a long final vowel, and the caesura falls there, after the sixteenth syllable, where the anuṣṭubh always breaks.

In marālīmandagamanā the long vowels of marālī should be given their full value, and the nd of manda is a dental cluster — both consonants made at the teeth — which must not slide back toward the retroflex ṇḍ practised in the line above. Mahālāvaṇyaśevadhiḥ brings the retroflex nasal back, this time before a palatal glide: ṇy is one joined articulation, the curled tongue releasing directly into y. The closing visarga is a light breath coloured by the vowel before it, so dhiḥ ends with a faint echo of hi rather than a hard h.

For the recitation done as archanā, with namaḥ appended to each name, this verse contains a useful irregularity. The first two names take the ordinary feminine dative in -āyai: śiñjānamaṇimañjīramaṇḍitaśrīpadāmbujāyai namaḥ, marālīmandagamanāyai namaḥ. The third does not, because śevadhi is a masculine i-stem and keeps its own declension, giving mahālāvaṇyaśevadhaye namaḥ. Reciters who have settled into the rhythm of -āyai routinely get this one wrong, and it is worth marking in the text.

What the verse asks of the person chanting it is slowness, and it says so twice — once in the name that describes her gait, and once in the construction of the first line, which cannot be hurried without collapsing into a blur of nasals. The portrait has been descending for several verses and it now touches the ground. It is customary to let the attention rest at the feet here rather than move on at once, both because the feet are the part of the image a worshipper is entitled to touch and because the hymn is about to leave the body altogether.