The nine-year-old and the thirty princes

Bhaṇḍa had thirty sons and the purāṇa names every one of them — Caturbāhu, Cakorākṣa, Catuḥśiras, Vajraghoṣa, Ūrdhvakeśa, Mahākāya, Mahāhanu, Makhaśatru, Makhaskandin, Siṃhaghoṣa and so on down to Atimāya, Bṛhanmāya and Upamāya at the end of the list. The names are a fair sample of the whole demon roster: several of them mean enemy of sacrifice, several are compounded with māyā, illusion, and several are simply large. They had trampled Indra and Varuṇa, their father told them, and this women's army would be no trouble at all.

Bālā is introduced at that point and the description is careful. She looks exactly like Lalitā, she is perpetually nine years old, she is a mine of every branch of learning, her body has the colour of the rising sun and the slenderness of a creeper, and she is always to be found at the footstool of the great queen. Then two phrases that are hard to improve on: she is the goddess's own vital breath walking about outside her, and she is her fourth eye. When Bālā decides she will kill the demon's sons and comes to ask permission, her mother refuses, and the refusal is the least theological speech in the whole work. Your limbs are soft, you are only nine, this is your first action, your training is barely finished, you are my only daughter, and without you my breathing does not continue even for a moment. We have Daṇḍinī and Mantriṇī and crores of śaktis to do the fighting. Why would you do this foolish thing. Bālā insists; her mother gives in, embraces her, takes off her own armour and puts it on her; and Bālā goes out and takes the heads off all thirty with thirty crescent-tipped arrows.

That girl is not only a character in a story. In Śrīvidyā practice Bālā is the deity of a three-syllable mantra, and it is very often the first mantra a student is given, years before the fifteen-syllabled one. The three syllables in question are aiṃ, klīṃ and sauḥ — which are precisely the three that the nyāsa preceding this stotra places on the reciter's fingers and on six points of the body before a word of the hymn is spoken. The tradition also reads those three as the seed, the power and the pin of the pañcadaśākṣarī, and both readings are current; what matters here is that a reciter who has done the nyāsa has already put the child-goddess on his own hands before arriving at name 74. The stotra will come back to her much later and simply call her Bālā, at name 965, followed at once by līlāvinodinī, she who is amused by play.

The second half of the verse raises a genuine problem that the tradition has never resolved. Viṣaṅga and Viśukra are Bhaṇḍa's brothers, born, in the purāṇa's account, out of what was left of the same heap of ash from which he himself was shaped. In the narrative chapters it is Śyāmalā — Mantriṇī — who fights Viśukra and shatters him with the missile called Brahmaśiras, and Daṇḍanāthā who kills Viṣaṅga with her plough and pestle. This verse and the next assign it the other way round: Mantriṇī kills Viṣaṅga, and Vārāhī takes the life of Viśukra. The two accounts sit a few chapters apart in the same book. Translators and commentators have noticed and have not agreed on what to do about it, and it is a useful thing to have seen once, because it shows that the hymn and the narrative it is embedded in were not composed as a single piece by a single hand.

The order of events is also not the story's order. In the purāṇa the sons die, then Viśukra throws his obstruction-engine and Gaṇeśa is born to destroy it, and only after that do the two brothers fall. The stotra puts both brothers before Gaṇeśa. It has grouped the deaths by kind rather than by day.

The one thing to get right in this verse is the word mantriṇyambā, which is where the second line begins. It is mantriṇī plus ambā, and the long ī of mantriṇī has been turned into the semivowel y in front of the following vowel — the change the grammarians call yaṇ. What you see written is मन्त्रिण्यम्बा, with the conjunct ण्य carrying the whole transformation, and what you say is man-tri-ṇyam-bā, four syllables where the two words apart would have given five. This is one of the commonest sandhis in the stotra and one of the hardest to spot, because the vowel that has vanished leaves no trace at all. The other direction is easier to remember than the rule: whenever you meet a ण्य or a त्य or a व्य in the middle of a compound and the sense will not come, try putting a long ī or a short i back in.

The verse is also a clean drill in the difference between dental n and retroflex ṇ, because the first line has both in quantity. Bhaṇḍa takes the retroflex — tongue-tip curled back through the whole ṇḍ — while bālā, vikrama and nanditā are entirely dental, and nanditā has two dental n sounds in four syllables. Chant bhaṇḍaputravadhodyukta as one unit and bālāvikramananditā as another, and let the tongue reset between them.

Viṣaṅga is worth taking apart because its neighbour in the next verse is nearly its twin. Vi-ṣaṅ-ga: retroflex ṣ, then the guttural nasal ṅ made at exactly the place where the following g is made, so the tongue does not travel. In the next verse comes Viśukra, with the palatal ś. The two brothers of the demon are distinguished, in sound, by a single sibilant moved one place forward in the mouth. Say viṣaṅga and viśukra one after the other until they are two different words.

Toṣitā has a retroflex ṣ of a different origin from harṣitā's in the verse before. There the r pulled the sibilant back; here the ṣ belongs to the root √tuṣ itself and has been there all along. The audible result is the same; knowing which is which keeps you from over-applying the rule.

Vadhodyukta returns from the previous verse in exactly the same metrical position, which makes the two verses sound like a matched pair even though one is about the army and the other about the princes. Keep the o long and let the dy be heard as two consonants.

On what to hold while chanting: this is the verse of the child. The tradition treats Bālā's mantra as the beginner's mantra, and there is an obvious lesson in the fact that the first thing the beginner is given is the figure who insisted on going into the hardest fight before she was ready and won it. It is also, plainly, a verse about a mother watching her daughter do something dangerous, and it does not ask to be read as anything else.