The vein that carries her consort's life, and a seat in the Punjab

Kāmeśvara, lord of desire, is the name under which Śiva appears in this school, and its iconography places the two of them together on a single throne. Nāḍī means a tube or vessel — the channels of the yogic body, the ducts of the medical texts, a hollow stalk — and prāṇa is breath in the sense of vitality. What the name says is not that she is dear to him or necessary to him but that his life runs through her as blood runs through a vein — the standard Śākta reversal, formulated most famously in the opening verse of the Saundaryalaharī: Śiva joined with Śakti is able to create, and otherwise the god cannot so much as stir.

Kṛtajñā is an ordinary word of Sanskrit ethics, meaning recognition of what has been done for one; its opposite, kṛtaghna, the ingrate who destroys the memory of a service, is listed in the dharma literature among the worst kinds of person. Applied to a deity, the word turns the usual arrangement around: gratitude is what the worshipper is supposed to feel, and here it is attributed to the one being worshipped. The implication, drawn out by commentators, is that the smallest offering places her under an obligation she will meet. Not all readings take it that way: kṛta also means simply what has been done, so the compound can be read as 'she who knows everything that is done', a name about omniscience rather than reciprocity, and the traditions differ on which sense to prefer.

Kāmapūjitā depends on a story every reader of Sanskrit knows. After the death of Satī, Śiva withdrew into austerity, and the gods, who needed a son of his to defeat the demon Tāraka, sent Kāma to disturb him. Kāma loosed his flower arrow, Śiva opened the third eye, and the god of desire was burnt to ash on the spot — which is why one of his standard names is Ananga, the bodiless one. Kālidāsa's Kumārasambhava tells the episode with more sympathy for the victim than for anyone else. The hymn is not retelling that story so much as adding to it: Kāma is here a worshipper of the goddess, and one strand of the tradition holds that what he recovered, he recovered from her. There is also a lineage claim in the name. Śrīvidyā counts twelve traditional transmitters of the fifteen-syllabled mantra, and the two lineages that survived are named after two of them: the kādi school, whose mantra begins with the syllable ka and which traces itself to Kāmarāja, that is Kāma, and the hādi school, which begins with ha and traces itself to Lopāmudrā. Kāmapūjitā is therefore a statement about the source of a transmission as much as a mythological remark.

Śṛṅgāra is a technical term of literary theory, not a synonym for eroticism. Bharata's Nāṭyaśāstra sets out eight rasas — the erotic, the comic, the pitiable, the furious, the heroic, the fearful, the disgusting and the marvellous, with the peaceful added later as a ninth — and defines rasa as something produced in an audience rather than felt by a character. Śṛṅgāra is conventionally called the king of the rasas; its stable underlying emotion is rati, love, and the theorists divide it into union and separation. To call her sampūrṇā, filled to the brim, with this rasa is to place her in the vocabulary of the theatre. It is worth setting the name beside cidekarasarūpiṇī two verses earlier, where her single savour was consciousness; the hymn puts both statements in the same neighbourhood and does not rank them.

Jayā, two syllables, is victory itself, and behind it stands the narrative that frames this hymn: the sahasranāma is embedded in the Lalitopākhyāna, the account of her campaign against Bhaṇḍāsura within the Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa. Jayā is also, with Vijayā, an attendant who accompanies the goddess in Purāṇic descriptions.

The last name belongs to a different order of religious fact. Jālandhara is one of the pīṭhas, the seats where the goddess is held to be locally and physically present. The story behind them is the dismemberment of Satī: Śiva, maddened by grief, carried her body across the world until Viṣṇu cut it away piece by piece with his discus, and wherever a piece fell a seat was established. The Kālikā Purāṇa is the fullest early source, and the resulting lists vary enormously, from four seats in the older tantric reckoning to fifty-one in the commonest later count. The tantric group of four is Kāmarūpa, Oḍḍiyāṇa, Pūrṇagiri and Jālandhara, and Jālandhara is generally identified with the region around the town of that name in the Punjab. The seats were also internalised, correlated in various schemes with points along the axis of the practitioner's own body.

The first line runs on k: kāmeśvara, kṛtajñā, kāmapūjitā, three names opening on the same guttural, and the second line answers with two on j. The division is metrically clean, one long name or a pair of short ones to each quarter, and the caesura after the sixteenth syllable falls at the end of kāmapūjitā, which is where to breathe.

Kāmeśvara is kāma plus īśvara, a short a and a long ī combining into e — one of the commonest joins in the hymn and worth recognising by sight, since it means the name contains the word īśvara and not a word beginning with e. In prāṇa the ṇ is retroflex because of the r that precedes it, the same automatic shift that produces taruṇī and rūpiṇī elsewhere; the same rule accounts for the rṇ of sampūrṇā. Then nāḍī puts a dental n and a retroflex ḍ in adjacent syllables, which is a useful contrast to practise deliberately: for nā the tongue is at the teeth, for ḍī it is curled back against the roof of the mouth.

Kṛtajñā contains two things learners find hard. The ṛ is a vowel, not the sequence r plus i, and it occupies one short beat; and jñ is a conjunct whose recitation varies widely by region. Its classical value is the voiced palatal stop j followed by the palatal nasal ñ, but in much of the north it is pronounced gya, in Maharashtra dnya, and in the south close to the written value. All are traditional in their own areas; what matters is knowing that they are one letter.

Śṛṅgāra begins with the palatal sibilant ś followed immediately by vocalic ṛ, which is a syllable in its own right, and continues into ṅg, the guttural nasal before g — the ng of English 'finger' rather than of 'singer'. Then sampūrṇā gives mp, a long ū, and the retroflex conjunct rṇ. Jālandharasthitā has ndh and sth, in both of which the aspiration is a puff of breath after the stop, not a fricative.

For archanā: kāmeśvaraprāṇanāḍyai namaḥ, with the ī-stem taking -yai; then kṛtajñāyai namaḥ, kāmapūjitāyai namaḥ, śṛṅgārarasasampūrṇāyai namaḥ, jayāyai namaḥ, jālandharasthitāyai namaḥ.

The verse asks something of the reciter mainly by its register. Anyone who has been chanting attentively has just spent two verses in the vocabulary of Vedāntic exegesis and the philosophy of language, and is now handed a name about the erotic flavour and another about a town in the Punjab. Nothing in the text marks this as a descent. The hymn is constructed so that the same list holds pure consciousness, a specific street address, and the god of desire kneeling, and the practice of reciting the whole thing in order is in part a training in not sorting them into ranks.

Of the six, kṛtajñā is the one that bears most directly on what a person actually does in front of an image or a diagram. Ritual manuals prescribe elaborate offerings that few can perform in full, and the name says that what is registered is the fact of the offering rather than its scale. It is also the only name here that describes her attitude to the worshipper rather than her nature, her consort, or her location.