Greater than everything, and living in a particular range of hills

Viśvādhikā is a comparative built with an ablative: greater than the universe, exceeding it. The Puruṣa Sūkta had made the same claim by arithmetic — all beings are one quarter of him and three quarters stand immortal beyond — and the point of such formulations is to block the inference that if the divine is everything then it is exhausted by everything. The name is doing philosophical work in four syllables, and the work is the ordinary work of Vedānta, which is a good reminder that this hymn's tantric material sits inside a Vedāntic frame rather than beside it.

The two Veda names are best read as a pair even though three names separate them. Vedavedyā, to be known by means of the Vedas, is what a defender of the tradition's orthodoxy would want to say; the Gītā says it of Kṛṣṇa in almost the same words. Vedajananī, mother of the Vedas, reverses the dependency. Śrīvidyā spent much of its literary energy on exactly this manoeuvre, arguing that its mantra and its goddess were not extraneous to the Veda but its source and its secret meaning, and that a brahmin could therefore practise both without contradiction. The two names are that argument in miniature, and their placement on either side of a mountain address is a fair picture of how the text works: doctrine, geography, doctrine.

The Vindhyas are not a symbol. They are the range that runs east to west across the middle of the subcontinent and that Sanskrit geography treats as the boundary between the north and the south — a frontier, in older literature a place of forests and of peoples outside brahminical order. The goddess of that range, Vindhyavāsinī, has a temple at Vindhyachal near Mirzapur on the Ganges which is still one of the busiest goddess shrines in north India, and she was a major independent deity long before this hymn. The Devī Māhātmya records her at the moment of absorption: in the last chapter the goddess predicts her own future arrivals and says she will be born in the cowherd Nanda's house from Yaśodā's womb and, dwelling on the Vindhya mountain, destroy the demons. That verse is doing two things at once — attaching the Vindhya goddess to the Kṛṣṇa story, in which the infant girl exchanged for Kṛṣṇa escapes Kaṃsa's hands and takes to the hills, and attaching her to the great goddess. When the sahasranāma gives Lalitā the name, the absorption is complete and no longer needs explaining.

Viṣṇumāyā is the fourth name in this batch that hands her another deity's property. The Devī Māhātmya has a long litany in which the goddess is saluted under the name of whatever she is in all beings, and viṣṇumāyā heads the list. Behind the name is the story from that text's first chapter, in which the sleep that holds Viṣṇu is a goddess, and she must withdraw before he can wake and act. Read that way the compound is not saying she belongs to Viṣṇu; it is saying that the power everyone calls Viṣṇu's is a person, that she has her own name, and that Viṣṇu is at her disposal rather than the other way round.

Vilāsinī closes the verse with the tradition's favourite word for what the world is. The dictionary's sense for the noun is a lively, charming, coquettish woman, but vilāsa in this literature is a technical term: the shining-out or sporting of consciousness, manifestation undertaken for no reason except that it is in her nature to manifest. It is the word in the title of the Kāmakalāvilāsa, the treatise behind the second name of verse 73, where it names the unfolding of the point into a world. Placed at the end of a verse that has just called her greater than the universe, the ordainer, and the māyā of Viṣṇu, it defuses all three. What looks from below like arrangement, illusion and immensity is, from her side, play.

Seven names, all beginning with v, and the caesura falls after vedavedyā and after vedajananī. That leaves the two longest names, vindhyācalanivāsinī and the pair viṣṇumāyā vilāsinī, filling the second half of each line.

The great gift of this verse is that it puts all three Sanskrit sibilants in it, and the contrast is easy to hear once pointed out. Viśvādhikā has ś, the palatal, made with the tongue against the hard palate — the nearest English sound is the sh of "sheep", said with the tongue flat and forward. Viṣṇumāyā has ṣ, the retroflex, made with the tongue-tip curled well back, a duller and darker sound. Vilāsinī has plain dental s, the tip at the teeth. Say viśva, viṣṇu, vilāsinī in a row, three times, and this verse will have taught you the distinction that the whole stotra depends on.

Vindhyācalanivāsinī opens with a three-consonant cluster, न्ध्य: n, then the aspirated dh, then y. All three are dental or palatal and close together, so the sequence is fast rather than difficult, but the aspiration must be audible — vindhya, not vindya. The same aspirated dh returns immediately in vidhātrī, where it is followed by the cluster tr, so the second line begins with two clusters in five syllables: vi-dhā-trī.

Viśvādhikā contains a sandhi worth reconstructing: viśva plus adhikā, two short a sounds merged into one long ā, giving viśvādhikā and hiding the word-boundary completely. This is the commonest vowel sandhi in the language and the one that most often defeats a beginner trying to look a name up in a dictionary. Split it before you search.

Viṣṇumāyā has the cluster ṣṇ, retroflex sibilant into retroflex nasal — the tongue curls back for the ṣ and stays exactly where it is for the ṇ, with no movement between them. This is the same economy you met in aṣṭamī in verse 5 and will meet again in the ṣ names of verse 84. Keep the u short: viṣ-ṇu, not viṣ-ṇū.

Watch the ordinary vowels too. Vedavedyā has four short e and a sounds and one long ā, and the dy in the middle is dental d into y. Vedajananī is five short vowels and a long ī at the end, the lightest name in the verse; vidhātrī, immediately before it, is two longs and nothing else. Alternating those two correctly is what gives the second line its shape.

On what to hold while chanting: the verse is an exercise in refusing to choose between the vast and the local. It is easy to chant the abstractions with attention and let the mountain go past as a piece of geography, and that is the wrong way round. The tradition's claim is not that she is everywhere in general. It is that she is everywhere and also in the Vindhyas in particular, where there is a temple with a queue outside it, and that neither statement weakens the other. Ten verses further on the hymn will name two more places by name, and this is where it starts.