The boar-wheel chariot and the wall of fire

Kiri is a hog, and the chariot is the Boar Wheel because the goddess who rides it is boar-faced. Daṇḍanāthā has as many names as Mantriṇī: Vārāhī, Daṇḍinī, Potriṇī, Daṇḍanāyikā. She is the commander of the forces where Mantriṇī is the minister, and the difference is exact. A mantrin advises; a daṇḍanātha holds the daṇḍa, the rod, which in Sanskrit political vocabulary is the whole apparatus of coercion — punishment, police, the army, the king's power to compel. Kauṭilya's science of government is called daṇḍanīti, the handling of the rod. To say that the mistress of the rod goes in front of the goddess is to describe a state on the march, not a divine escort.

Her chariot has five tiers to Mantriṇī's seven and Lalitā's nine, and the purāṇa's roster for it is a good deal grimmer than the roster for the Wheel of Song. Below Daṇḍanāthā stand Jṛmbhiṇī, Mohinī and Stambhinī — the powers of yawning, bewilderment and paralysis — carrying a pestle, a plough and a vessel of liquor. Further down are the seven Dhātunāthās, the mistresses of the bodily constituents, with names of the Ḍākinī type; a lion called Caṇḍocchaṇḍa stands before the chariot; and there is a rank of eight headed by Vārtālī, one of Vārāhī's own names. The plough and the pestle are the weapons of Balarāma, farm implements used as clubs, and they suit her: this is the ugly end of the operation. In the Śrīcakra worship she is stationed in one of the outer enclosures, on the perimeter, which is where a commander of forces belongs.

Jvālāmālinī, the second half of the verse, is one of the fifteen Nityā goddesses, the eternal ones who will be named in the next verse. Her name means garlanded with flame, and at Lalitā's order she made the encampment a fortress. The purāṇa gives its dimensions in the way purāṇas do — a wall of fire some thirty yojanas high and a hundred across, with a single gap left open at the southern end, a yojana wide, facing Śūnyaka, so that the army could sortie. Whatever one makes of the arithmetic, the detail about the gap is not decoration. It is load-bearing for the next four verses. The fire-fort is a closed space with one door, and the entire crisis that follows happens inside it: Viśukra will creep up to the wall in the dark and throw his obstruction-engine over it, the paralysis will spread within an enclosure nobody can leave, and Gaṇeśa when he is born will have to search the enclosure to find where the thing landed.

Prākāra is the specific word for the rampart of a fortified town — the dictionary defines it as a wall raised on a mound of earth. So the besieging army has built itself a city wall out of fire, facing the demon's city across the plain. Śūnyaka, whose name means the empty place, will be reduced by a weapon to exactly what its name says; her own city, meanwhile, is made of nothing but burning. The two fortifications are set against each other deliberately.

One small point of vocabulary. The stotra calls her Jvālāmālinikā, with a -ka suffix on the end, and not Jvālāmālinī. The suffix is affectionate or diminutive in ordinary Sanskrit and is often added simply to make a name fit a line, and here it does both jobs at once: it fills the metre and it makes the fiercest goddess in the sentence sound, for one syllable, like somebody's daughter.

This verse ends in puraskṛtā and the last one ended in pariṣkṛtā. Chant them one after the other. Both are past participles of √kṛ with a prefix; the first has the retroflex ṣ because the s has been retroflexed by the i of pari- in front of it, and the second keeps a plain dental s because the a of puras- protects it. Pa-riṣ-kṛ-tā, pu-ras-kṛ-tā. That contrast is the most compact retroflex drill anywhere in the first fifty verses, and if you can hear it you can hear the difference everywhere else.

Daṇḍanāthā is the same lesson inside a single word. It begins with the retroflex pair ṇḍ — tongue-tip curled back for both consonants with no forward movement between them — and then goes immediately to a dental n and an aspirated dental th. Da-ṇḍa-nā-thā: back, back, forward, forward, with a puff of breath on the last. The th is t plus aspiration and never the sound in English "thin".

Kiri is easy to get wrong because it is so short. Two light syllables, both with a short i, and no stress on either; the temptation is to lengthen the first because the words around it are long. Then jvālāmālinikākṣipta, which is the hardest single stretch in the verse. It opens with jv, a cluster English does not have — say the j fully and let the v follow inside the same release, not as a separate syllable. It runs four long ā's in a row. And it ends with the seam where mālinikā meets ākṣipta: two long ā's swallowing each other into one, followed at once by kṣ. Break it as jvā-lā-mā-li-nī-kā | ā-kṣip-ta, rebuild it, and only then take it at speed.

Prākāra wants care in the opposite direction: two long ā's and an unaspirated k in the middle, with no breath after it. Vahni is v then h then n, three separate sounds. And madhyagā ends the line on dhy, an aspirated dental d immediately followed by y, which most learners simplify to a j-like sound.

The second line is a single sixteen-syllable name with no natural joint at the eighth syllable — the caesura lands inside -kākṣipta-, at the worst possible place. Most reciters take a light breath after jvālāmālinikākṣipta, which is one syllable late but divides the compound where it actually divides, between the thrower and the thing thrown.

On what to hold: the verse asks you to see two things at once, the point of the spear and the ring around the camp. It is worth noticing that the goddess is placed at neither. She is between them, in the middle, and the word for what she is doing there is simply going.