Vermilion in the parting of the Vedas

Śruti means what has been heard, from √śru, and it is the technical term for the Vedic revelation as distinct from smṛti, what has been remembered, which covers the secondary literature. The same word also means the ear itself, and in music a microtone. All three senses are alive in the compound, which is one reason the image works: a parting of the hair is a line running back between two ears.

Sīmanta is that parting, and it is not a neutral word. There is a rite of the same name in the household ritual, the sīmantonnayana, the drawing up of the parting, performed for a woman in pregnancy; so the term arrives already carrying marriage and motherhood. Sindūra is vermilion, and the mark of it worn in the parting is, across much of India, the visible sign that a woman's husband is alive. Put the two together and the compound says something more precise than that the Vedas are humbled. It says they have been made auspicious.

The grammar of the middle element is worth a moment because it is a construction learners rarely meet. Sindūrīkṛta is built with what the grammarians call the cvi formation: a noun whose final vowel is lengthened to ī and which is then joined to a form of √kṛ, to make, or √bhū, to become. It means made into something it was not before. So the dust has not merely landed on the parting; it has been turned into vermilion by landing there. Once you can recognise the -ī-kṛta and -ī-bhūta pattern you will find it everywhere in this literature, and it always carries that sense of conversion.

Why her foot-dust should be red is a question the stotra answered long before this verse. Everything about her is red — the meditation verses insisted on it three times over, and the third verse of the hymn had her radiance rising until the world-eggs floated in it. Red is the colour of will in this tradition, the first stirring by which anything comes to be. The dust is red because she is.

The image also has a specific target. The Upaniṣads are conventionally called the head of the Veda — vedānta, the end of it, and śrutiśiras, the crown — and the Saundaryalaharī builds a whole verse out of the fact, saying the heads of the Vedas carry her feet as a crest ornament. The sahasranāma's compound lands the dust precisely there. The most exalted part of the most authoritative text is where the mark goes.

The second line changes figure and keeps the argument. Āgama, revealed scripture, is the tantric counterpart of nigama, the word the previous verse used for the Vedic corpus; over two consecutive verses the hymn has claimed both bodies of revelation. Sandoha means a mass or aggregate, and its etymology is charming — sam plus √duh, to milk, so a sandoha is everything that has been milked together into one vessel. Śukti is the pearl-oyster. Sampuṭa is a casket made of two hemispherical halves that close on each other, and the word also has a ritual life of its own in mantra practice, where to sampuṭa a mantra is to enclose it between repetitions of another one, exactly as a pearl is enclosed. Mauktika is the pearl.

There is a classical belief behind the picture. Sanskrit poets held that pearls form when raindrops fall into an open oyster during a particular asterism, and the image recurs constantly in court poetry: something small and ordinary falls from above into something that then closes over it and turns it into a jewel. Applied here, the figure says that the whole of revelation, milked together into one shell, has exactly one thing in it, and that the shell is shut. Which is why the Upaniṣads themselves warn that the pearl does not come out for study alone.

Two names, one filling each line, and both of them ending in -ikā. The rhyme is exact and it is not an accident of the language; consecutive lines rhyming this cleanly are rare in the hymn, and hearing dhūlikā answer mauktikā is what tells you the two images are one statement.

The caesura in each line falls after the eighth syllable, and in both cases it falls inside the name. In the first line that puts it after sindūrī, which means the pause comes between the vermilion and the making of it. In the second it falls after sandoha, between the mass of scripture and the shell — which is the seam of the metaphor, so this is one place where the metrical pause and the sense agree. Hear the break without opening a gap in the sound.

Śruti opens with śr, a palatal ś directly into r. The ś is made with the tongue-body flat against the hard palate, and the r is a single tap of the tongue-tip, so the two use different parts of the tongue and can be produced together if you stop trying to sequence them. Then sīmanta gives you a dental s, a long ī and a dental n before a dental t, which is a whole quarter of the line with the tongue-tip forward.

Sindūrī has the long ī of the cvi suffix and it must be long; that vowel is the grammar. Kṛta then gives you the syllabic ṛ, short, one beat. Pādābja is pāda plus abja, with two short a sounds fusing into the long ā at the seam, and abja itself is worth knowing: ap, water, plus ja, born — the water-born, one of the many Sanskrit words for a lotus. The cluster bj, a labial into a palatal, is the hardest thing in the line and reciters routinely soften it to bija. Give the b its own closure and release.

Dhūlikā ends the line with an aspirated dh: d at the teeth, then breath, then the vowel. Never the English th.

The second line is easier but has three retroflexes hiding in it. Śukti has ś then a plain kt. Sampuṭa has a retroflex ṭ, and the anusvāra before the p is realised as a labial m, since an anusvāra always takes the place of articulation of whatever follows it. Mauktika opens with the diphthong au, which is a full-length vowel, and then kt again.

One long chain of long vowels runs through the first line — sī, dū, rī, pā, dāb, dhū — and almost none through the second, which is nearly all short until mauktikā. The two lines therefore feel completely different in weight even though they have the same number of syllables. That contrast is worth preserving rather than smoothing out: let the first line be slow and the second brisk.

In archanā both names take the ordinary -āyai, and both are long enough that the dative is a genuine feat of breath control. It is worth doing once.

What to hold while chanting: the verse is about scripture, and you are performing scripture while you say it. The first name puts the texts on the floor and the second shuts them in a shell, and neither is an insult. Both are ways of saying that what you are reciting is not the thing you are reciting it about.