Mother from Brahmā down to the worm

Ābrahmakīṭa is a span, not a list. The prefix ā, used with what is grammatically an ablative sense, means as far as, extending up to; the idiom is common in Sanskrit and turns up in phrases like ābrahmastambaparyanta, from Brahmā as far as a clump of grass, which is the standard way of saying every living thing without exception. Putting the two extremes in one compound and then calling herself the mother of the whole interval is a stronger statement than a general claim of universal motherhood would be, because it forces the reader to picture both ends at once.

Varṇāśrama is a single compound covering the two axes along which classical Indian society was described: the four varṇas, and the four āśramas or stages of a life — student, householder, forest-dweller, renouncer. The dharmaśāstra literature treats the pair as exhaustive, so varṇāśramadharma is simply the whole of normative social life. What the name adds is vidhāyinī, from vi-√dhā, to arrange, ordain, lay down. She is not said to sanction the arrangement; she is said to have made it. The Bhagavad Gītā's formulation of the same claim is more careful, and the care is worth noticing: the four classes were created by me according to the distribution of quality and action — and know me also to be the one who does not act. The stotra offers no such qualification here, which is a fact about the text worth registering rather than smoothing over, particularly since five verses earlier it declared her free of merit and demerit altogether.

Nigama, in the third name, is one of the standard words for revealed scripture, and it is normally used of the Vedic corpus specifically, in contrast with āgama, which is used of the tantric. The two words are a matched pair and the next verse of the stotra will use the other one. So over two verses the hymn claims both bodies of revelation, and it does so in different figures: here the Veda is her command, there the whole mass of tantric scripture is an oyster shell with her inside it.

The claim in nijājñārūpanigamā is precise and it takes a side in an old argument. Ājñā is a command, from ā-√jñā, to make known; nija means one's own. The Veda, the name says, is her command wearing the form of words. The Mīmāṃsā school, whose whole business was the interpretation of Vedic injunction, held the opposite: the Veda is apauruṣeya, not made by any person, without an author human or divine, and its authority rests precisely on the fact that no one issued it, since anyone who issued it could have been mistaken. The theistic schools took the other line and cited the Bṛhadāraṇyaka's image of the Vedas breathed out of the great being like smoke from damp fuel. This name is a two-word summary of that position.

The fourth name takes a side in the neighbouring argument. If a sacrifice performed today produces a result years later, what carries the result across the interval? Mīmāṃsā answered with apūrva, an unseen potency generated by the act itself and ripening on its own, and pointedly did not require a god. Vedānta answered that the fruit comes from the Lord, and the Brahma Sūtra makes the case in three words — phalam ata upapatteḥ, the fruit is from him, because that is what makes sense — arguing that an inert potency cannot apportion rewards. Puṇyāpuṇyaphalapradā puts her in that role. The interest of the name lies in what it does to the preceding one. If she both issues the injunctions and delivers the results of obeying or disobeying them, then the moral order is not a mechanism she supervises. It is an arrangement, made and administered by the same person, and the last thing the stotra said about her own standing in it is that she is not in it.

This is the most metrically regular verse in the whole stretch: four names, four quarters, eight syllables each, one name filling each quarter exactly. Nothing straddles a boundary, and the caesura in each line falls cleanly between two names. After the sixteen-syllable monsters of the last verse and the one before, it is a chance to feel the anuṣṭubh's basic shape with nothing complicating it.

Ābrahmakīṭajananī begins with a long ā that is doing grammatical work: it is the prefix meaning as far as, and it is the whole reason the name means from Brahmā rather than of Brahmā. Shortening it does not just mispronounce the word, it removes the preposition. Then brahma gives you hm inside a single cluster once again — h and m with no vowel between, the same problem as in pañcabrahmasvarūpiṇī and brahmarūpā — and kīṭa gives you a retroflex ṭ after a long ī. Jananī, three plain dental n sounds after that retroflex, is a good contrast: tongue-tip back for kīṭa, then forward for all of jananī.

Varṇāśramavidhāyinī has the retroflex ṇ in varṇa, triggered by the r before it, and then the palatal ś in āśrama, and then dhy in vidhāyinī. The seam is varṇa plus āśrama, a short a meeting a long ā to give one long ā, which is the same fusion as in padmāsanā in the previous verse and in carācara before that. It has now appeared often enough to be treated as a habit rather than a rule.

Nijājñārūpanigamā contains the cluster jñ immediately after a long ā, which is awkward because the tongue has to come up to the hard palate from an open vowel with no transition. Say ni-jā-jñā slowly. The last element, nigama, is all short vowels and is easy to rush past, which is a pity, since it is the word that tells you what the name is about.

Puṇyāpuṇyaphalapradā is the neatest word in the verse and the most satisfying to say. It is puṇya plus apuṇya — merit and its negation, with the negating a swallowed into the long ā at the seam, exactly as in dharmādharma five verses earlier — then phala, fruit, then pradā, giver. Both occurrences of puṇya have the retroflex ṇ followed by y, which is a genuinely difficult sequence: the tongue-tip is curled back for the ṇ and then has to spring forward and flat for the y. Do not let the ṇ soften into a dental n on the second occurrence, which is where the fatigue shows.

In archanā all four names take the ordinary -āyai of the feminine ā-stems, so this verse is also the simplest one in the neighbourhood to practise that ending on: ābrahmakīṭajananyai namaḥ is the only irregular one, because jananī is an ī-stem and takes -yai.

What to hold while chanting: the verse is a set of four claims about jurisdiction and it reads coldly if you take it as an inventory. The warmth is in the first name and the first name governs the rest. The same person who laid down the social order and dispenses the results of everything anyone does is being described, in the same breath, as the mother of an insect.