The engine of obstruction, and the answering rain

What Viśukra had thrown into the fire-fort was a stone slab a couple of krośas across, inscribed with an eight-angled figure and eight tridents, with eight deities stationed on it and Alasā, Sloth, at their head. Its name was Jayavighna, the obstruction of victory. What it produced in the army is set out as a list of eight, and the list is the most transparently allegorical thing in the entire war: sloth, meanness of spirit, wretchedness, sleep, unmanliness, forgetfulness, heedlessness and torpor. These are not the ways an army loses a battle. They are the ways a practice collapses. The śaktis stopped fighting, sat down, and began saying to one another that they were not sure the goddess was worth following.

The cure is equally pointed. Nothing is done to the enemy. The problem is inside the enclosure, so the newly made Gaṇeśa goes into the enclosure and looks for it, moving about within the wall of fire until he finds where the slab has been hidden; then he pounds it to powder with his tusks, destroys the deities posted on it, and throws the dust away on the wind. The morale returns at once, and the tradition takes his boon — that he shall be worshipped before all other gods, in every undertaking — to date from this service. That is why, in a school whose deity is Lalitā, the first invocation in every ritual is to her elephant-headed son.

The second name moves into the vocabulary of epic warfare, and the distinction it turns on is worth having. Śastra is a weapon held in the hand; astra is a missile discharged by mantra, a weapon that is really a formula. Every astra in the epic tradition has a counter, and a duel between two masters is conducted as an exchange of named missiles, each one neutralised by the correct answer. Pratyastra is that answer. The Lalitopākhyāna gives the whole exchange as a table: Bhaṇḍa releases a weapon that produces a particular kind of enemy, and she releases the deity who historically dealt with that kind. He brings back Madhu and Kaiṭabha, Raktabīja and the old demons of the Devī Māhātmya; she laughs, and the goddesses of that text come out of the laugh and kill them again. He brings back others; she answers. The pattern will produce, in the next verse, the most spectacular of the answers.

There is a joke buried in the arrangement, and it is a Sanskrit joke about grammar rather than a comic one. For eight names the goddess has been the object of other people's verbs: gladdened, made eager, delighted, satisfied, overjoyed. Every one of those participles is passive or causative. The moment she starts fighting, the grammar turns: varṣiṇī is an active participle in the feminine, she who rains, formed on the same root as the śaravarṣa, the rain of arrows, that is the oldest cliché in Indian battle poetry. The stotra has spent five verses telling you that she watches, and it announces her entry into the fight by changing a suffix.

One further point about the obstruction-engine that is easy to miss. The thing Viśukra inscribed was a yantra — a diagram, with angles and enclosures and deities set at the points. It is, in other words, the same kind of object as the Śrīcakra she is riding. The war has a diagram on each side, and the difference between them is not their form but what they are for.

The consonant work in this verse is heavy and it repays being taken slowly. Start with vighnayantra, which contains two clusters most learners flatten. Ghn is an aspirated guttural g running straight into a dental n, with the aspiration audible in between; ntr is dental n, dental t and r in a single release. Say vi-ghna-yan-tra. Then nirbhinna, which has rbh — an r followed by an aspirated b — and then a genuinely doubled nn that must be held long enough to hear as two. Then praharṣitā: pr at the front, and rṣ in the middle, where the r has pulled the sibilant back into the retroflex position, exactly as in harṣitā three verses ago.

The second line is a str exercise. Śastra, pratyastra: three clusters built on str in the space of eight syllables, and each one preceded by something different. Śastra opens with the palatal ś and then has a dental s inside the str. Pratyastra has pr, then ty, then str. The temptation is to let all of them turn into a single mushy sound. Take the line at half speed as bha-ṇḍā-su-ren-dra-nir-muk-ta | śa-stra-pra-tyas-tra-var-ṣi-ṇī and rebuild it.

Bhaṇḍāsurendra is three words fused: bhaṇḍa, asura, indra. Bhaṇḍa plus asura merges two a-sounds into one long ā, and asura plus indra merges an a and an i into a single e. Two seams, and in the Devanagari each shows as one vowel sign with nothing to indicate that a word has ended inside it. Learning to see भण्डासुरेन्द्र as three names rather than one is the same skill as learning to see क्रोधाकाराङ्कुश as four words, and it is the single most useful reading skill this text demands.

Nirmukta gives rm followed by kt, four consonants in a row across two syllables with only a short u between them. And varṣiṇī ends the verse with rṣ and then the retroflex ṇ produced by the same r — one letter causing two retroflexions in three syllables.

A metrical detail: this is the first verse in some while whose second name is an ī-stem rather than an ā-stem, so the line ends on a long ī instead of a long ā. After eight consecutive names closing on -ā the change is genuinely audible, and it happens to fall on precisely the name where she stops being the recipient of other people's valour and starts fighting. Let the vowel be heard.

As for what to hold in mind while chanting: the eight afflictions the engine produced are a fair description of what actually stops a daily practice, and the remedy in the story is not more effort but the removal of something that had been planted and hidden. It is a verse about looking for the obstruction rather than pushing harder against it.