The empty city burned to nothing

Bhaṇḍāsura could not simply be fought, and the reason is in his boon. When Brahmā granted him his powers the demon asked, among other things, that half the strength of any adversary who faced him should pass over into his own — which makes ordinary combat not merely difficult but self-defeating, since the harder you strike the stronger he gets. That is why the campaign is settled by a missile rather than by a duel, and why the missile has to be one that is not, in any straightforward sense, an opponent.

The Kāmeśvara weapon closes the largest circle in the whole story. Śiva burnt Kāma to ash with the fire of his eye; someone gathered the ash and shaped a figure from it; Brahmā's exclamation of astonishment gave the figure its name; the figure made the three worlds unliveable; the gods went into their own sacrificial fire; she came up out of it; and now she destroys him with a weapon named for Śiva in his aspect as the lord of desire. The thing made from the ashes of desire is destroyed by desire's own arm. The next verse will complete the circle by bringing Kāma himself back to life, so the whole of the Lalitā narrative sits inside the interval between the burning of the love-god and his restoration.

Śūnyaka is a name to sit with. It is simply the word śūnya, empty, with a suffix, and Monier-Williams gives it as empty, void, and as the absence or lack of something. The demon's capital is called the Empty Place, and the weapon reduces it to precisely what it was already named. Some accounts of the story call the city Śoṇitapura instead, the city of blood, but the reading in this hymn is śūnyaka and the pun is too good to be accidental. What was made out of ashes returns to ashes and what was called empty becomes empty; the stotra records both in one sixteen-syllable word and does not comment.

The second name gives the three highest gods in a single compound and it is worth taking them apart. Brahman is the creator. Upendra is Viṣṇu — the name means Indra's younger brother, and it belongs to him as Vāmana, born to Aditi after Indra was already established. Mahendra is Indra himself, the great Indra, king of the gods and the one with the actual grievance. So the compound runs creator, preserver, sovereign, and the -ādi at the end sweeps in everyone else. The hymn has been keeping a strict order of precedence throughout the battle — Mantriṇī beside her, Daṇḍanāthā in front, the Nityās on the field — and it observes it here too, at the point where the whole pantheon lines up to say thank you.

The narrative is a little less decorous than the hymn. In the purāṇa the gods do praise her at length, and then, in the same breath, ask her for something else: Bhaṇḍa is dead, they say, but his friend Tāraka is still alive, and to kill Tāraka Śiva must have a son, and for Śiva to have a son the god of love must be alive again, and he is currently ash. The great hymn of praise turns out to be a preamble to a request. That is the business of the next verse.

One small textual note for anyone comparing editions. Some print sabhaṇḍāsura with a short first vowel, some sabhāṇḍāsura with a long one, and the two spellings are found in different manuscript traditions of both the name and the surrounding narrative. Nothing in the sense turns on it, but if two printed books in front of you disagree, this is why.

This verse contains the best sandhi exercise in the whole batch, and it is the second name. Brahmopendramahendrādi is four words fused into one: brahman, upendra, mahendra, ādi. Brahma plus upendra has merged a short a and a short u into a single o. Mahā plus indra has merged a long ā and a short i into a single e — and that merger happened long ago, inside the name Mahendra itself, which is why it is easy to miss. Then mahendra plus ādi merges a and ā into one long ā. Three seams, three single written vowels, and no visual trace of where the words stopped. Take the compound apart on paper once and it will stay apart in your ear.

Nirdagdha returns from the previous verse in the same metrical position. Voiced g into voiced aspirated dh, no vowel between, aspiration on the second consonant only. Two verses running with the same cluster in the same place is the stotra offering you a drill; take it.

The sa- at the head of sabhaṇḍāsura is not part of the demon's name. It is the ordinary Sanskrit prefix meaning along with, the same syllable as in the sakuṅkuma and saśara of the fourth meditation verse, and it governs everything after it: the city, along with the demon. Keeping it separate in your mind keeps the compound from turning into an undifferentiated string.

Saṃstuta puts an anusvāra directly before a sibilant. Before s, ś or ṣ the anusvāra has nothing to assimilate to, so it stays a pure nasal hum with the mouth still open — not an n, not an m, just voice through the nose while the tongue gets ready for the s. Saṃ-stu-ta. The same thing happens in saṃsthitā in verse forty.

Now a small pleasure. Read the second line aloud and notice what is missing: brahmopendramahendrādidevasaṃstutavaibhavā has no retroflex consonant in it at all, and no conjunct harder than st. After eight verses of ṇḍ and kṣ and ṣṭ and gdh, the line where the gods sing is the one line your tongue can take flat. Whether the Vāgdevatās did that on purpose is unknowable; that the effect is there is not.

The two diphthongs are worth holding to their full length: the ai of vaibhavā and the e of -pendra- and -hendra-, which in Sanskrit are always long, however short the syllable feels.

On what to hold: many reciters treat this verse as the end of a section and take a fuller breath after it, because the battle finishes here and the next verse turns to the mantra. If you are chanting the hymn in parts over several days, this is a natural place to stop. It is also worth noticing what the hymn does not do at this point. There is no gloating, no description of the enemy's remains, and no account of the victory celebration — one line for the destruction, one line for the praise, and then the subject changes.