The ever-moist Nityā, and half of Śiva's body

Klinna is the past participle of √klid, to be wet, to soften or grow moist, and it is an entirely ordinary word — damp cloth, moist earth, eyes wet with tears. Nityaklinnā, perpetually moistened, is therefore not an image coined for this hymn. It is the proper name of one of the sixteen Nityā goddesses, third in the usual enumeration, in a company that begins with Kāmeśvarī and Bhagamālinī and ends with Lalitā herself. The Nityās are counted against the lunar fortnight, one goddess to each tithi, so that the set of sixteen states that the moon's cycle is a divine body moving through phases. The sense of the moisture is disputed in the direction one would expect. The word carries an erotic charge that the tantric material does not disown, and the commentators generally gloss it also as compassion: a heart that never dries out, that is already wet before it is asked. The two readings rest on the same physical observation, that a living thing is soft and damp and a dead one is not.

The fourth name gathers the whole set. Nityāṣoḍaśikārūpā says that her form is the sixteen-fold company of the Nityās — that she is not one goddess with fifteen attendants but the group considered as a single body of which they are something like limbs. Sixteen is a loaded number in this literature. The moon has fifteen visible digits, kalās, which wax and wane; the tradition posits a sixteenth, the amākalā, which never wanes and is never seen, and identifies it with what does not perish in a person. The same arithmetic governs the mantra. The pañcadaśākṣarī, the fifteen-syllabled formula of this school, becomes the ṣoḍaśī, the sixteen-syllabled, by the addition of one syllable that is transmitted in initiation and not printed. Ṣoḍaśī is likewise the goddess's name in one of her ten Mahāvidyā forms. And the school's central scripture on this material — the Nityāṣoḍaśikārṇava, the Ocean of the Sixteen Nityās, which forms the first half of the Vāmakeśvaratantra — carries very nearly this name of hers as its title. Bhāskararāya, whose commentary on the sahasranāma is the one most often consulted, also wrote the Setubandha on that tantra, so the two works sit close together on his own shelf.

Between the moist name and the sixteen stand two denials. Nirupamā is built on upamā, likeness, which is the standard Sanskrit word for a simile, with the prefix nis: she for whom there is no comparison and therefore, strictly speaking, no poetry. It is a self-limiting name to find inside a hymn of a thousand descriptions, and the hymn knows it. Nirvāṇa is more interesting than its Buddhist fame suggests. It derives from nir-√vā, to blow, and names an extinguishing — what happens to a lamp when the flame goes out for want of fuel rather than because someone has smothered it. Hindu texts use the word without embarrassment; the Bhagavad Gītā speaks repeatedly of brahmanirvāṇa, an extinction that is Brahman, and treats it as the terminus of a disciplined life. The order here is deliberate. Extinction is named, and then the very next name fills that emptied space with sixteen goddesses. Whatever going out means in this tradition, it is not a subtraction.

Śrīkaṇṭha, the glorious-throated, is a name for Śiva that comes out of the churning of the ocean. When the gods and their rivals turned Mount Mandara with the serpent Vāsuki for a rope, the first thing the sea gave up was not nectar but hālāhala, a poison black enough to end the world, and Śiva drank it and held it in his throat rather than let it down into his body. The throat was stained blue. The commoner epithet for this is Nīlakaṇṭha, blue-throated; Śrīkaṇṭha reads the same mark as an ornament rather than an injury, a throat made splendid by what it refused to pass on. The name has a second life in ritual: in the nyāsa performed with the fifty letters of the alphabet, the fifty Rudras invoked along with them are headed by Śrīkaṇṭha, so that the name stands at the head of the sound-body of the world.

Half of that body is hers. Behind śrīkaṇṭhārdhaśarīriṇī stands Ardhanārīśvara, the lord who is half woman, carved from the early centuries of the common era onward as one figure divided down its length — one breast and one flat chest, a woman's earring on one side and a man's on the other, hair braided here and matted there. By convention she holds the left. What the tantric traditions add to the iconography is a claim about capacity rather than about marriage, and they like to make it with a pun: śiva without the vowel that is her becomes śava, a corpse. The half-body is not a courtesy extended to a consort but the condition of his being able to act at all. Read that way, the last name in the verse is the strongest in it, and the hymn has set four names of eternity and negation in front of it as a run-up.

Four of the five names begin with ni or nī, and the first line is almost entirely nasals and dentals: nityaklinnā nirupamā nirvāṇasukhadāyinī. Taken at speed it becomes a blur in which reciters lose their count, repeat a name, or drop one. The safeguard is to hear the line as three unequal units — four syllables, four syllables, then eight — and to let the last name occupy the whole second half of the pāda without hurrying to get through it.

Nityaklinnā has two clusters worth slowing for. The kl of klinnā is a guttural k released straight into a dental l with nothing between them; English manages this easily in a word like clean, provided the l is kept forward at the teeth rather than allowed to drift back. The nn that follows is a genuinely doubled consonant, held about twice as long as a single n, the way the two n sounds in thin nail are held when the phrase is said carefully. Clipped to one n it is a different word.

Nityāṣoḍaśikārūpā is the mouthful of the verse, and it runs through two sibilants that English collapses into a single sound. Ṣa is retroflex, made with the tip of the tongue curled back toward the roof of the mouth; śa is palatal, made with the blade of the tongue near the hard palate and closer to the sh of sheep. The ḍa between them is retroflex again. So ṣo-ḍa is said with the tongue held back for both syllables, and only then does it come forward for śi-kā. These three syllables repay more practice than the length of the word suggests, because ṣoḍaśa, sixteen, recurs everywhere in this literature.

Śrīkaṇṭhārdhaśarīriṇī contains a rule as well as a sound. The ṇṭh of kaṇṭha is a retroflex nasal followed by a retroflex aspirated stop — tongue back for both, and the h of ṭh is breath released through the same closure, not a separate letter. At the end of the word, the possessive suffix -in has become -iṇ: śarīriṇī, not śarīrinī. This is the rule Sanskrit grammarians call ṇatva, by which an n later in a word is retroflexed under the influence of an earlier r or ṣ even across intervening vowels. The same thing is visible in svarūpiṇī, rūpiṇī, and dozens of other names in this hymn; once the reader has noticed the cause, the spelling stops looking arbitrary.

For recitation as archanā, the names are put into the dative, and this verse happens to display both patterns at once. The three ā-stems take -āyai: nityaklinnāyai, nirupamāyai, nityāṣoḍaśikārūpāyai. The two ī-stems take -yai with the long ī turning into a y before it: nirvāṇasukhadāyinyai, śrīkaṇṭhārdhaśarīriṇyai. Reciters who have learned the ending only as -āyai will produce the wrong form for the second and fourth names of the hymn's next few verses as well, so it is worth fixing the distinction here.

As to what the verse asks of the person saying it: only one of these five names describes a transaction, and it is the one that offers the least usable thing. Nirvāṇasukhadāyinī does not promise relief, protection, or an outcome, and a reciter who has come with a request will find the verse quietly declining to take it. What the verse offers instead is placed first and given without being asked for. She is already wet.