Desire drawn as a diagram, and a bulb under the soil

Kāmyā is a gerundive: the one to be desired, the desirable. Read on its own it is a compliment. Read against the passage in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka in which Yājñavalkya explains to his wife why anything at all is dear to anyone, it becomes an argument. Nothing, he says, is dear for its own sake; husband, wife, children, wealth and even brahminhood are dear for the sake of the self. If that is true, then whatever is genuinely desirable in anything is the self showing through it, and a name that says she is the desirable is a name that identifies her with the self. This is how Śākta texts characteristically do Vedānta — not by argument but by making the conclusion a name and moving on.

Kāmakalārūpā is the first frankly esoteric name in this stretch of the hymn, and it needs care, because the texts that describe the kāmakalā treat it as restricted knowledge and describe it in code. The word itself is transparent: kāma, desire, and kalā, a part, a portion, a digit of the moon, an art. What it denotes is a figure — three points arranged as a triangle, with a fourth element below — which is at once a diagram, a syllable, and a body. The classical treatment is the Kāmakalāvilāsa of Puṇyānanda, a short and difficult work with a commentary by Naṭanānandanātha, and its account is worked out in terms of the bindu, the point in which speech and light are held before either has separated out. The clearest thing a beginner can actually look at is Saundaryalaharī 19, which spells the visual arrangement out: the face as the point above, the two breasts below it, and below those the half-form of Hara. Note that Monier-Williams, whose 1899 dictionary is otherwise so good on this vocabulary, has only "a name of Rati" for kāmakalā. There are parts of this tradition that the lexicon simply does not reach, and this is one of them.

The kadamba is Neolamarckia cadamba, a large tree of the Indian plains whose flowers are borne in dense orange globes and open at the start of the rains. Its association with Śrīvidyā is not casual. Śaṅkara's description of her island in the sea of nectar plants it with a grove of nīpa, which is the kadamba under another name, so the tree she likes flowers where she lives. In the south the same connection is fixed to the ground: Madurai, the great temple city of the goddess Mīnākṣī, has been called the kadamba forest, and the tree is the temple's own. The attendant goddess Śyāmalā is likewise placed in a kadamba wood. When a name says a flower is dear to her it is reporting an offering that is actually made.

Jagatīkandā takes a different picture of origin from the one the upaniṣads made famous. A kanda is a bulb or tuber — the dictionary lists garlic and elephant-foot yam among its senses — and the point of a bulb is that it is underground, unimpressive, and not the plant you can see. The world is the shoot; she is the swelling below the soil that the shoot comes out of. Set this against the Muṇḍaka's images for the same relation, the spider spinning out its thread and hair growing on a living body, and the family resemblance is clear: what is wanted in all of them is a source that stays in continuous material relation with what comes from it, rather than a maker standing outside its product. The word also has a technical life in yoga, where kanda names the bulb at the base of the trunk from which the channels of the subtle body are said to spring — a sense that will matter nine verses later when she is called the artery that carries Kāmeśvara's breath.

The last name is a rasa name, the second of three in these fifteen verses. Karuṇa is not simply pity; it is one of the eight flavours catalogued by Sanskrit dramatic theory, the flavour of grief and compassion, and putting rasa into the compound rather than saying karuṇāsāgarā means the name is using the technical vocabulary on purpose. What she is an ocean of is not an emotion she feels but a savour that can be tasted — the same category as the delight of name 311 in the verse before and the erotic flavour of name 376 eleven verses ahead. The three together are a small argument about what the goddess is: not a being who has states, but the taste of the states themselves.

Six names, all beginning with k except the fifth, and the caesura is clean: kāmyā kāmakalārūpā, then kadambakusumapriyā; kalyāṇī jagatīkandā, then karuṇārasasāgarā. The two long names each fill a half-line exactly.

The consonant to watch is the unaspirated k. Sanskrit distinguishes k from kh absolutely, and English speakers aspirate every initial k without noticing — the puff of air that follows the k in "kite" would make kāmyā into khāmyā, which is a different word. Hold the back of your hand in front of your mouth and say kāmyā, kadamba, kalyāṇī, karuṇā; if you feel breath, the k is wrong. This verse gives you five chances in a row to fix it.

Kāmyā opens with the cluster my, labial nasal into palatal glide, which wants to become miya if you let it. Keep it as one beat: kām-yā, two syllables, not three. Kalyāṇī has the parallel cluster ly and then a retroflex ṇ; the tongue-tip is at the teeth for the l, at the palate for the y, and curled right back for the ṇ, three distinct positions in four syllables. Say it slowly enough to feel all three.

Karuṇārasasāgarā is the rhythmic problem of the verse. It is eight syllables of which six are short a and two are long ā, and the temptation is to even them out into a jog. The long syllables are the fourth and the seventh — ka-ru-ṇā-ra-sa-sā-ga-rā — with a final long ā as well, and the retroflex ṇ sits just before the first of them. Chant it four times on its own, exaggerating the length of nā and sā, before you put it back in the line.

Two sandhis are worth reconstructing. Kāmakalā plus rūpā simply juxtaposes two words with no change, but jagatī plus kanda produces jagatīkandā with the long ī of the first member preserved — a reminder that ī-stems in compounds do not shorten the way one might expect from the Devanagari. And the third name is a straightforward chain, kadamba-kusuma-priyā, three words in a row with no fusion at all, which makes it a good one to break apart and reassemble while reading the script.

On what to hold in mind: this verse asks for two quite different kinds of attention within eight seconds. The second name points at something the tradition does not explain in public, and the honest posture towards it while chanting is neither to pretend to understand nor to skip past it, but to say it accurately and leave it standing. The fifth and sixth names ask for the opposite — they are entirely concrete, a bulb and a body of water, and they reward being pictured. The kadamba between them is the hinge: an actual flower, of a real tree, which someone somewhere is putting in front of her image at the moment you are chanting.