Watching her own powers fight

The army in this war is unusual in that it contains almost no gods. In the Lalitopākhyāna the Śaktisenā is created by Lalitā herself out of herself, and apart from Kāmeśvara the devas are not in the line of battle at all — they are the reason for the war and its beneficiaries, but they do not fight it. This is the opposite of the arrangement in the Devī Māhātmya, where the mother-powers step out of the bodies of Brahmā, Śiva, Skanda, Viṣṇu and Indra and go into battle wearing each god's shape, ornaments and mount. There the goddess is assembled out of the gods; here the goddess assembles the fighters out of herself. The two verses quoted below sit on either side of that difference and are worth reading in that order.

The Nityās named in the second half are the fifteen eternal goddesses of her retinue, and the tradition associates them one to one with the fifteen lunar days of the bright fortnight: Kāmeśvarī, Bhagamālinī, Nityaklinnā, Bheruṇḍā, Vahnivāsinī, Mahāvajreśvarī, Śivadūtī, Tvaritā, Kulasundarī, Nityā, Nīlapatākā, Vijayā, Sarvamaṅgalā, Jvālāmālinī and Citrā, with Lalitā herself counted as the sixteenth and the full moon. Jvālāmālinī, who built the wall of fire in the verse just past, is the fourteenth of them, so the two verses are linked by more than sequence. It is also worth registering what it means to send the tithi-goddesses into a battle. The days of the waxing moon are attacking, in order, and the demon is being worn down by the calendar.

Āṭopa, the word chosen for the manner of their attack, is a small masterpiece of tone. Monier-Williams gives it as puffing, swelling, then a multitude, then flatulence, then pride and self-conceit. It is not a dignified word. It is the swagger of troops who know they are winning, the visible inflation of confidence, and the poet has used it of the Nityās while the goddess watches from the chariot with obvious enjoyment. Set beside the grim inventory of the Boar Wheel in the previous verse, it shows how wide the emotional range of this section is: the same campaign contains paralysis-goddesses with pestles and a mother delighting in her daughters' swank.

The grammar of both names puts her in the receiving position. Harṣitā and, in the next verses, nanditā, toṣitā and praharṣitā are all causative participles: she is made glad, she is caused to rejoice, the pleasure is done to her by what she sees. For a hymn otherwise composed of a thousand assertions of sovereignty, this is a notable stretch of passives. Whatever the theology says about her being the only agent in the universe, the poetry has her sitting in a chariot being delighted by other people.

A note on the enemy's scale, since the stotra gives none. The purāṇa's numbers for Bhaṇḍa's forces run to thousands of akṣauhiṇīs and forty named generals, and the fighting is organised into days with commanders killed in a definite order — the sons, then the brothers, then the demon himself. The stotra tracks that order exactly over the next five verses. If the sequence of these names has ever seemed arbitrary, it is not: it is a casualty list in chronological order.

The verse is two more sixteen-syllable names, one to a line, and both are long tatpuruṣa chains that end in a participle. The trick with a name of this shape is to find the joint. In the first line the joint is after -vadhodyukta-: everything before it describes what the śaktis were bent on doing, everything after it is their valour and her pleasure in it. In the second the joint is after -āṭopa-. Breathe with those joints in mind and the lines organise themselves.

Bhaṇḍa is aspirated bh followed by the retroflex pair ṇḍ, and it recurs in three of the next four verses, so fix it now. The bh is a b with an audible puff of breath, not a v and not an f; the ṇḍ is made with the tongue-tip curled back for both consonants together.

Vadhodyukta hides a sandhi that the writing conceals: vadha plus udyukta, a short a and a short u merging into a single o. Knowing that keeps the sense visible while you chant — the slaughter, then the being-braced-for. The cluster dy in the middle is a dental d immediately followed by y, and the two must be heard as two.

Harṣitā gives you ṣ after r, which is the ordinary Sanskrit outcome and worth noticing as a pattern rather than a fact about this word: r pulls the following sibilant back into the retroflex position. The same thing has happened in varṣiṇī three verses later.

The second line is a chain of long ā's across two sandhi seams. Nityā plus parākrama plus āṭopa gives nityāparākramāṭopa, and the ā's of -krama and āṭopa have fused into one. Note that the ṭ of āṭopa is retroflex; so is the ṇ of nirīkṣaṇa a few syllables later, and there the retroflexion is caused by the ṛ and the kṣ in front of it — the same rule that will give you prāṇa and haraṇa in the verse after next. Kṣ itself is k plus the retroflex ṣ, never an English "x".

Samutsukā ends the verse on ts, which is a genuine cluster of two dental sounds and not the ch of English "church". Sa-mut-su-kā, with the t released before the s begins.

On what to hold while chanting: the verse is an instruction in how to watch. The traditional reading is that everything in the field of experience is her power in action, and that the appropriate attitude toward it is neither anxiety nor detachment but this — leaning forward, keenly interested, delighted by the courage of what is not, in the end, anybody else.