A glance between them, and a son

Viśukra and Viṣaṅga were made, in the purāṇa's telling, out of the remainder of the same ash from which Bhaṇḍa himself was shaped, so all three of the enemy's commanders are the residue of the burnt god of desire. Vārāhī fights the second of them with a plough and a pestle — Balarāma's implements, farm tools used as clubs — and the name given to her act is prāṇaharaṇa, the carrying off of the breath. It is a precise word rather than a poetic one. She does not cut him down; she removes the vital air, which is what the tradition understands death to be.

The second half of the verse belongs to a different chapter of the story and, oddly, to an earlier one. Bhaṇḍa, watching his forces melt, had asked his brother what could be done, and Viśukra, who was the family's specialist in magic, proposed a device. Working under cover of darkness and hidden by māyā, he went up to the wall of fire, inscribed on a stone slab an eight-angled figure with eight tridents and eight guardian deities headed by Alasā, and threw it over into the enclosure. The slab was called Jayavighna, the obstruction of victory. Its effect on the army was immediate and is described symptom by symptom in the next verse's note. Mantriṇī and Daṇḍanāthā came to report that the śaktis would not fight.

What Lalitā did then is the whole of the second name. She looked at Kāmeśvara's face and smiled, showing a line of very red teeth, and from the meeting of that smile with that face there arose a god with an elephant's face, ruddy as the dawn, ten-armed, holding mace, trident, conch, lotus and tusk on one side and citron, bow, discus, a sheaf of grain and a jewelled pot in his trunk on the other, wearing red silk, three-eyed, with the crescent on his crown, his consort against his body and rut running from his temples. That is Mahāgaṇapati, the form of Gaṇeśa specific to this tradition, and the twenty-eight-syllable mantra addressed to him is very often the first mantra a Śrīvidyā student receives.

The verb the stotra uses for what she did to him is kalpita. Monier-Williams gives the range: formed, fabricated, contrived, invented, imagined. It is not the word for begetting. It is close to the vibhāvaye of the second meditation verse, where the reciter is told to bring the goddess into being by imagining her. Applied to Gaṇeśa the word says that he was thought up on the spot, in an emergency, by two people looking at each other — and that thinking him up was sufficient to produce him with ten arms and a wife.

One discrepancy is worth flagging because a careful reader will hit it. In the narrative chapters this episode comes before the deaths of Viśukra and Viṣaṅga: Gaṇeśa breaks the slab, comes out of the fire-fort with his own troops, and fights Viśukra, who runs; only later do Mantriṇī and Daṇḍanāthā kill the two brothers. The stotra reverses the order, putting both brothers in names 75 and 76 and Gaṇeśa in 77 and 78. It has grouped the material by category — the brothers together, the Gaṇeśa episode together — rather than following the days of the battle. Combined with the swapping of the two brothers' killers noted in the previous verse, this is good evidence that the hymn was composed against the story rather than out of it, by someone summarising from memory a narrative he expected his hearers to know better than he did.

This verse is the place to learn the rule that governs half the retroflex nasals in the stotra. In the first line you have prāṇa and haraṇa, and in both of them the n has become a retroflex ṇ. Neither is arbitrary. When an r or an ṛ or an ṣ has occurred earlier in the same word, a following n is pulled back into the retroflex position, even across intervening vowels and certain consonants. The pra of prāṇa does it; the ha-ra of haraṇa does it. Once you have the rule you will see it everywhere in this batch — varṣiṇī, dhāriṇī, svarūpiṇī, nirīkṣaṇa, and the aruṇa and karuṇā that run through the whole hymn — and you will also see where it does not apply, as in nanditā and mantriṇī, whose ṇ has a different cause.

The drill of the verse, though, is the pair of names Viśukra and Viṣaṅga. Viṣaṅga, in the line just past, has a retroflex ṣ: tongue-tip curled back. Viśukra, here, has a palatal ś: the tongue-body flat against the hard palate, the same position as the y in "yes". The two demons are separated in sound by one sibilant moved a single place forward in the mouth, and most learners collapse both into an English "sh". Say vi-ṣaṅ-ga, vi-śu-kra, back and forth. Then note that the kra of Viśukra is a plain unaspirated k with an r inside the same release, and that the u before it is short.

Vārāhī and vīrya want long vowels held to their full value: vā-rā-hī is three long syllables in a row, and vī-rya begins with a long ī and ends in a cluster of r and y that has to be got through without inserting a vowel between them. Vīr-ya, not vī-ri-ya.

The second line has one sandhi and one long compound. Kāmeśvara plus mukha plus āloka gives kāmeśvaramukhāloka, with the a of mukha and the ā of āloka merged into a single long ā — the seam falls in the middle of a written mātrā and cannot be heard, so the reader supplies it. After that the line runs kalpita-śrī-gaṇeśvarā with an lp cluster in the middle and the retroflex ṇ of gaṇa near the end. The natural breath is after -āloka, which is also the correct joint in the compound: everything before it is the glance, everything after it is what the glance made.

One last observation about sound and sense together. This verse ends the run of four names in which she is grammatically acted upon — harṣitā, samutsukā, nanditā, toṣitā, nanditā again — and the second name here is the first in the sequence where she is the one doing something, even if what she does is only look. From the next verse onward the participles turn active. The change in the grammar is the change in the plot.

On what to hold: the tradition's instruction here is unusually concrete, because Mahāgaṇapati is worshipped before Lalitā in every ritual sequence of this school. If you begin a recitation with a remembrance of Gaṇeśa, as most reciters do, this is the verse that tells you why he is there and what he was for.