Wine made from the flower of the previous verse

Kalā is one of the most productive words in this vocabulary and the name kalāvatī cashes in on all of it at once. The dictionary's first sense is a small part of anything, especially a sixteenth part; from that come the digit of the moon, a division of time, and the fine arts, of which the tradition counts sixty-four. A possessive in -vat on such a stem means she has them all, and the hymn has already said so more explicitly at name 236, catuḥṣaṣṭikalāmayī, made of the sixty-four arts. The lunar sense is not idle either: eleven verses further on she will be called the sixteen eternal goddesses, and the sixteenth digit of the moon is the one that does not wane.

Kalālāpā looks like the same word again and is not. Kala, with a short final a, is a separate entry: indistinct, inarticulate, and then low, soft, melodious — the dictionary's example of it is a voice thick with tears. Ālāpa is speaking, conversation, and also the twittering of birds; in music it is still the word for the unmetred exploration that opens a performance. So the name does not say her speech is artful. It says it is soft and not quite articulate, which in Sanskrit poetics is a compliment of a specific kind, and it sits three names before a verse about wine and four verses before the hymn takes up the stages of speech in earnest.

Kādambarī is the richest word in the verse. The dictionary's entry for kādambara gives a spirit distilled from the flowers of the kadamba tree, and then something better: the rainwater that collects in hollows of the same tree when the flowers are at their peak, which is supposed to be sweetened by them. Either way the drink comes out of the tree named one verse earlier, and the two verses read as a single gesture — she likes the flower, and she likes what the flower is turned into. The word carries two more things. Kādambarī is a name of Sarasvatī, and it is the title of Bāṇa's seventh-century romance, the most famous prose narrative in Sanskrit, named after its heroine. A hymn that has just called her soft-spoken now gives her a word that means liquor, the goddess of speech, and a novel.

Vāruṇī is likewise a person before it is a substance. The dictionary makes her Varuṇa's female energy, produced at the churning of the ocean and presiding over spirituous liquor — so this is the second time in four verses that a goddess has been folded into a compound, after rākā the goddess of the full-moon night. And the picture of a goddess who has been drinking is much older than any tantra: in the Devī Māhātmya, Caṇḍikā drinks again and again in the middle of the battle with Mahiṣa, laughs, and goes back to killing him with her eyes red.

What the tradition does with the wine is the interesting question, and it is one on which Śrīvidyā has never been of one mind. In kaula lineages madya is one of the five substances of the ritual and is actually offered. In the samaya or right-hand form dominant in the south, everything of that kind is read internally: the liquor is the nectar that drips from the moon at the crown of the head when the practitioner's attention reaches it, so the intoxication described here is a physiological event in the subtle body and not a beverage. Both sides quote names like this one. What the name itself will not let either side avoid is vihvalā, which means overcome, unsteady, at a loss — a word for someone who is not in control. The hymn is willing to say that of her, in the same verse in which it calls her the giver of boons. This is not the only time; at name 577 she is mādhvīpānālasā and mattā, languid from drinking honey-wine, and simply drunk.

The verse is eight and eight, with the names falling neatly: kalāvatī kalālāpā, then kāntā kādambarīpriyā; varadā vāmanayanā, then vāruṇīmadavihvalā. The change of initial consonant happens across the line break, so the two halves sound like two different verses joined.

The first pair is a vowel-quantity trap laid deliberately. Kalāvatī is ka-lā-va-tī, short then long. Kalālāpā is ka-lā-lā-pā, with three long syllables running. And the underlying words differ: kalā with a long final ā in the first name, kala with a short a in the second. Say the two names slowly one after the other and make the difference audible; if they sound the same you have flattened a distinction the poet is using.

The hardest single sound in these fifteen verses is the hv of vihvalā, written विह्वला with ह् joined to व. It is a voiced h running straight into a v with no vowel between them, and English never asks for this. Do not insert a vowel — vi-ha-va-lā is wrong — and do not drop the h. Start the h with the voice already on, as in the middle of "ahead", and let the lips come to the v while it is still sounding. Three or four slow repetitions of vi-hva-lā will do more than reading about it.

The v itself needs attention throughout the second line, and again in the next three verses, which are full of it. Sanskrit v is made with the lower lip approaching the upper teeth without the full buzzing contact of an English v; after another consonant, as in svāhā or in the sv of the next verse but two, it is closer to an English w. What it is never is a b. Reciters from some regions merge the two, and vāruṇī becoming bāruṇī changes the word.

Kāntā has a dental nt: tongue-tip at the back of the upper teeth for both, not curled back. Kādambarī has a long ā, then short a, then short a — kā-dam-ba-rī — and the temptation is to lengthen the dam because of the m. Vāruṇī has a retroflex ṇ, tongue curled well back. And varadā, sitting between all these long syllables, is three short vowels and a long: va-ra-dā, light and quick.

The last name is a compound of three words and worth taking apart in the script before chanting it: वारुणी + मद + विह्वला, the liquor, the intoxication, and the state of being overcome, with no sandhi anywhere to disguise the joins. Reciters usually take the breath after vāmanayanā, which puts the whole of that eight-syllable name in one arc.

For contemplation: hold the first name and the last together rather than letting the verse drift. Complete mastery of every art, and a body that is not steady. The tradition has spent a great deal of ink deciding what the wine is, and the chanting does not require that question to be settled — but it does require that the name be said without flinching, because a hymn that describes the supreme as swaying is telling you something about what it thinks the supreme is like.