Devotion has power over her

The three bhakti names are not synonyms padded out to fill a line. Priyā, gamyā and vaśyā make a ladder, and each rung concedes more. That she is fond of devotion is unremarkable; every devotional text says as much, and the Gītā says it in its most quoted form when it accepts a leaf, a flower, a fruit or water offered with love. That she is reached by devotion is a stronger claim, because it puts bhakti above the two rivals a Sanskrit text would name in the same breath, knowledge and ritual action; the Gītā again makes precisely this move at the end of its eleventh chapter, where the vision of the universal form is said to be available by undivided devotion and by nothing else, not the four Vedas, not austerity, not gift, not sacrifice. But bhaktivaśyā goes past both. Vaśya belongs to the vocabulary of control. In tantric ritual manuals vaśīkaraṇa is one of the six acts, the rite by which a practitioner brings another person under his will, and it is named alongside pacification, immobilisation and worse. To call the goddess vaśyā is to say that the one thing which works on her is the one thing that cannot be performed as a technique.

Bhayāpahā closes the set and closes it correctly. Fear is what the ritual manuals are mostly about — the six acts exist because the world is dangerous — and a goddess who has already conceded that devotion governs her has nothing left to threaten anyone with.

With śāmbhavī the hymn turns to the husband's names, and it takes them from the oldest available stock. Śambhu means the one who is good to be with, from śam, wellbeing, and bhū; it is the mildest of Śiva's names, the one used when the terrifying aspect is being deliberately set aside. Śāmbhavī is its feminine derivative and it is also a technical term with a long history: śāmbhavī mudrā is the yogic posture of the eyes open and the attention withdrawn, and in the non-dual Śaivism of Kashmir the śāmbhava upāya is the highest of the three paths, the one in which nothing whatever is done because there is no distance left to cross. The name carries that sense as well as the marital one.

Śarvāṇī takes the other Vedic name. Śarva and Bhava stand side by side in the Śatarudrīya, and the ancient sense of śarva is the archer, the one whose arrow is out; the name is old enough that the Atharvaveda tradition treats Śarva as a distinct being to be placated rather than a title of anyone. Set beside bhavānī in the previous verse it completes a pair the Veda itself had already made.

Śāradārādhyā is the odd one out and the most interesting. Śāradā is Sarasvatī under her autumn name, the goddess of speech and learning, and she is here not among the worshipped but among the worshippers. This should be read against the frame narrative of the stotra itself, in which the thousand names are not composed by a human seer but by the Vāgdevatās, the goddesses of speech headed by Vaśinī, on Lalitā's own command. The hymn has already told us that speech worships her. This name says it again in a single word. It is also the name that ties the text to a place: Śāradā is the presiding goddess of the Śṛṅgeri maṭha and of the Śāradā Pīṭha in Kashmir, and Śrīvidyā in South India has been transmitted in institutions that worship her.

Śarmadāyinī ends the verse on another Vedic word. Śarman is a shelter, a roof, a covering — the Ṛgveda asks constantly for śarman, meaning literally a place to be under during a storm — and only by extension does it come to mean happiness. It is also the ending traditionally attached to brahmin personal names. The verse that began by admitting that devotion controls her ends by saying that what she hands out is a roof.

The first line repeats bhakti- three times and the temptation is to let the repetitions blur into each other. They should not. Each is four syllables, bhak-ti-pri-yā, bhak-ti-gam-yā, bhak-ti-vaś-yā, and the whole information of the line is in the fourth syllable of each: -yā preceded by pri, gam, vaś. Chant the line with the second element slightly deliberate and the ladder becomes audible.

The cluster kt in bhakti is a dental t immediately after an unaspirated k, with no vowel between them. English has the sequence only across word boundaries. Say bhak and then ti as two closed gestures rather than gliding. Vaśyā adds the palatal ś before y, both made at the hard palate, so the tongue does not move between them.

The second line is one long exercise in the palatal sibilant. Śāmbhavī, śāradārādhyā, śarvāṇī, śarmadāyinī: four names, four ś sounds, and not one of them is the s of English see. The tongue-body rises to the hard palate, as it does for the y of yes, and the air hisses over it. Do this four times and the line is nearly finished.

Śāmbhavī hides a conjunct that most reciters simplify. It is m followed by aspirated bh: śām-bha-vī, with the lips closing for the m and reopening with a breath for the bh. Śāradārādhyā ends in dhy, a voiced aspirated dental followed by y, and it is preceded by three long ā vowels in a row — śā-ra-dā-rā-dhyā — which is the sort of run that makes reciters hurry. Do not.

The finest point in the verse is the pair śarvāṇī and śarmadāyinī. The first has a retroflex ṇ, the second a dental n, and they are three syllables apart. The reason is a rule of the language: an r earlier in the word pulls a following n back to the retroflex position, provided nothing that blocks the process intervenes. In śarvāṇī the intervening v does not block it, so the n retroflexes. In bhavānī of the previous verse there is no r at all, so it stays dental. In mṛḍānī, which is not in the text but is the same formation from mṛḍa, the retroflex ḍ does block it and the n stays dental too. That is a real grammatical mechanism producing an audible difference, and this pair of verses puts both outcomes within a few seconds of each other.

One more small thing: bhayāpahā is bhaya plus apahā, and the a of bhaya has merged with the a of apahā into a single long ā. The word is four syllables, bha-yā-pa-hā, and the long second syllable is the seam.

Metrically the verse divides cleanly into eight four-syllable names, two per quarter, with the natural breath after bhayāpahā. It is one of the easiest verses in the stotra to memorise for exactly that reason, and it is often used as the entry point by people learning the hymn.

For contemplation the third name is the one to sit with. It is a strange thing for a hymn to say of its own deity that she can be controlled, and the tradition does not soften it. The instruction hidden in the order of the four names is that the only leverage anyone has on her is the one that cannot be manufactured — which is why the fourth name can promise the end of fear without sounding like a boast.