Witness of the dance at the end of the world

Sākṣin is the word that carries this verse, and it is worth taking apart. It is built from sa, with, and akṣi, the eye: one who was there with his own eyes. In ordinary Sanskrit it is the legal term for a witness in a lawsuit. Vedānta borrowed it and made it technical, and in that use the sākṣin is consciousness considered purely as that before which things appear — never an agent, never affected by what it registers, present equally in waking and dream and dreamless sleep. The point of calling her the witness of the tāṇḍava is therefore not that she is brave enough to watch. It is that the final destruction of the universe is an event, and events happen in front of awareness, and awareness is not one of the things that can be destroyed. The stotra will develop exactly this in five verses' time, when it runs her through waking, dream and sleep and then calls her the fourth.

The dance itself has a technical name. Tāṇḍava is the vigorous, masculine style, set against lāsya, the gentle and lyrical one; the Nāṭyaśāstra makes Taṇḍu, an attendant of Śiva, the teacher of it, and the tradition has always heard the attendant's name inside the word. When it is performed at the close of a kalpa it is the destruction itself and not a representation of it — the same idea that the bronze Naṭarāja figures of the Cōḻa period state in metal, with the drum of emission in one hand and the fire of withdrawal in the other. A kalpa is a day of Brahmā, at the end of which the worlds are drawn in; the purāṇas give figures for its length and do not entirely agree, and the compound here is best heard as naming the great dissolution rather than a unit on a calendar.

Mahiṣī is not a poetic word for wife. In the Vedic royal consecration the king has several wives with distinct ritual standing, and the mahiṣī is the first of them, the one anointed alongside him and the one with a part to play in the horse sacrifice. The literal sense of the noun is unglamorous — mahiṣa is a buffalo, mahiṣī the female of it — and what it conveys is bulk, weight, standing. So the name places her beside Kāmeśvara as a matter of constitutional fact, not of affection. That she is queen specifically of Kāmeśa, the lord of desire, keeps the tradition's central claim in view: the power at the top of this system is not renunciant.

The third name is the school's own. Tripurasundarī is the deity of the fifteen-syllabled mantra, and mahā- here does not add a superlative so much as mark the full form of the title. The three cities have been read in as many ways as there are commentators, and the readings are worth knowing because they are not alternatives so much as layers: the three cities burnt by Śiva in the old myth; the three states of waking, dream and sleep; the three bodies, gross, subtle and causal; the three segments of her mantra; the three sets of lines that structure the Śrīcakra; the three powers of will, knowledge and action. What all the readings share is that she is not in one of the three but presides over the set.

One last thing about the shape of this verse. The stotra has been piling up mahā- names for five verses, and here the prefix does something different in each of the three. In the first name it is distributed — a great lord, a great dissolution, a great dance — so that mahā occurs three times inside one word. In the second it modifies the husband. In the third it modifies the title itself. The chain is not running on inertia; it is being worked.

The first line is a single word sixteen syllables long, which makes it one of the longest names in the hymn and the one most likely to be taken at a run. Do not run it. It has an internal structure you can lean on: maheśvara, mahākalpa, mahātāṇḍava, sākṣiṇī — four pieces, the first three of which each begin with mahā. Say it as four, with no breath between them but with the seams audible.

Two places in this verse show the same sandhi and it is one of the most common in the language. Mahā ends in ā; īśvara begins in ī; a followed by i, in either length, gives e. So maheśvara is mahā plus īśvara, and in the second line mahākāmeśa is mahākāma plus īśa. Once you can hear e as the fused product of a and i you will start finding it everywhere in this text, and it will stop being an arbitrary vowel.

Tāṇḍava gives the retroflex pair ṇḍ: the tongue-tip curls back for the nasal and stays curled for the stop, with no forward movement between them. This is the same cluster as in kuṇḍa in the fourth name of the stotra and in maṇḍala later on, and it is worth drilling as a unit rather than as two sounds.

Sākṣiṇī packs a great deal into four syllables. The kṣ is a conjunct of k and the retroflex ṣ, and Sanskrit treats it as a single cluster; the ṇ that follows is retroflex too, so the tongue-tip is back for the ṣ, forward and up for nothing at all, and back again for the ṇ. Say sāk-ṣi-ṇī slowly. Then contrast it with mahiṣī in the next line, where the ṣ is retroflex but the vowel around it is short and the ending is a long ī. Sākṣiṇī and mahiṣī are a good minimal drill for the retroflex sibilant in two different environments.

Sundarī is easier than it looks and is often mispronounced anyway. The n is dental — tongue-tip against the back of the upper teeth — and the d that follows is dental too. Nothing in this word is retroflex, which is precisely why it is worth saying immediately after tāṇḍava and sākṣiṇī, so the ear registers the difference.

The caesura is after the sixteenth syllable, which here is the end of the first line and therefore the end of the first name. That is unusual and it means this verse breathes in two halves rather than four quarters. Give the whole of the first line one arc.

What to hold while chanting it: the temptation is to picture the dance, because the dance is spectacular. Resist it and stay with the watcher. The verse spends fourteen of its sixteen opening syllables setting up a catastrophe and then, in the last two, tells you that somebody is looking at it calmly. That is the content. In practice the second and third names are often used on their own — mahātripurasundarī is the standard invocation of this tradition and appears at the head of countless ritual manuals — but taken out of the verse they lose the reason the title is being conferred.