Rolling eyes, flushed cheeks, sandal paste and campaka

Mada, the word that governs the first half of the verse and has already governed the last name of the one before it, is not a polite word made respectable by context. Its oldest concrete sense is the dark, sharp-smelling fluid that runs from the temples of a bull elephant in season; from there it covers wine, drunkenness, sexual excitement, arrogance and any overflowing exhilaration, and Sanskrit poets use all of those senses without marking the transitions. The hymn takes the word up and repeats it three times in as many names. Ghūrṇita is the past participle of a verb meaning to whirl, to reel, to sway to and fro — it is what a spinning top does, and what a drunk person's gait does. Her eyes are being described as unsteady in their movement, not merely half-closed.

Rakta, the other half of that compound, is worth pausing over because it is doing double work. It is the participle of a root meaning to colour or to dye, so its first sense is "reddened". But the same root gives rāga, which in Sanskrit means colour, musical mode, and passion all at once, and rakta accordingly also means "impassioned, in love, attached". A Sanskrit reader hears both in raktākṣī: eyes physically red, and eyes full of desire. This is exactly the ambiguity that later Śrīvidyā commentary exploits when it reads the whole cluster of mada names as descriptions of her state in union with Śiva rather than as a report about drinking.

The Devī Māhātmya, which stands behind much of the martial imagery of this hymn, has the goddess drink before her greatest fights, and it describes the effect in almost these words: reddened eyes and laughter. That text and this one are working the same seam. Battle-fury and erotic intoxication are treated in Śākta literature as two faces of a single overflow of energy, and the reciter who has been through the Bhaṇḍāsura narrative earlier in the hymn will recognise the vocabulary here even though the setting has changed from a battlefield to a bedchamber.

Pāṭala names a colour by naming a flower. The pāṭalī or trumpet-flower tree has pale pink blossoms, and the word came to mean that shade of rose across the whole language — the same tree gave its name to Pāṭaliputra, the ancient capital on the Ganges. Gaṇḍabhū is a stranger formation: gaṇḍa is the cheek, and bhū is the ordinary word for earth, ground, or expanse, the noun behind bhūmi. To call her cheeks a bhū is to treat the side of the face as a terrain across which a colour spreads, which is a characteristically Sanskrit way of describing a blush — as weather over a landscape rather than as a change in a person.

Sandalwood is the most heavily freighted scent in Indian ritual. Its heartwood is ground on a wet stone into a thick pale paste, and the paste is cooling, which is why it is applied to the forehead in hot weather and why poets use it as the standard remedy for the fever of longing. Sandal came overwhelmingly from the hills of the far south, and the mountain range called Malaya is so bound up with it that malayaja, "born of Malaya", is simply a synonym for sandalwood. Candanadrava, liquid sandal, is the ritual substance itself: the third of the sixteen services, gandha, is the smearing of exactly this paste on the image.

The campaka, Michelia champaca, is a tall tree with narrow yellow-gold flowers whose scent is so strong that a single blossom perfumes a room and is said to draw bees from a distance. Sanskrit poetry uses it constantly for the colour of golden skin and for overwhelming fragrance. Cāmpeya is the vṛddhi derivative of campaka — "belonging to the campaka tree" — and the name simply reports a preference, as this hymn likes to do: not that all flowers please her, but that this one does. That specificity is part of the hymn's method. A goddess who is also called the substance of all thirty-six principles is here allowed to have a favourite flower, and the tradition takes the second claim as seriously as the first.

This is one of the most regular verses in the entire stotra: four names, each of exactly eight syllables, one filling each quarter. Nothing has to be grouped or divided, and there is no ambiguity about where one name ends and the next begins. For that reason it is a good verse on which to work at accuracy of articulation rather than at memory, and it is worth slowing down deliberately here.

The first name contains two clusters that English speakers routinely soften. Ghū begins with a single aspirated voiced velar — g with breath released through it, not g followed by a separate h — and carries a long ū. Then rṇi: an r immediately followed by a retroflex ṇ, with the tongue curling back for the nasal. The name ends in kṣī, where kṣ is a single conjunct, k released directly into the retroflex ṣ.

Madapāṭalagaṇḍabhūḥ is a drill in retroflexes: ṭ in pāṭala, then ṇḍ in gaṇḍa, all made with the tongue tip curled up and back against the roof of the mouth, quite unlike the dental t and d of mada and candana. The name ends in a visarga after a long ū, a light breath, not a syllable. In archanā it becomes madapāṭalagaṇḍabhuve — the stem ends in ū and takes -ve rather than the -āyai that most names in this hymn take, which is the one place in the verse where a reciter working from habit will go wrong.

In the second line, candanadravadigdhāṅgī has two clusters in a row that want care: gdh, a plain g released into an aspirated dh with no vowel between, and then ṅg, where ṅ is the velar nasal of English "sing" and is followed by a fully pronounced g. Cāmpeya opens with the palatal c, which is the sound in "church" but without aspiration and made further forward; the e of -pe- is a long vowel by nature, as every e in Sanskrit is. Priyā ends the verse with the pr cluster, a single tap of the r.

The verse also has a shape worth using: two names beginning with mada, then two beginning with the palatal c. Reciters who lose their place in this stretch — and the mada names invite it, because there are several in a row — can hold onto that pairing.

As to what the verse asks of the person chanting it, two things. First, it puts the sandal and the flower in the order in which they are offered in worship, so if the recitation is part of a pūjā, the hands and the words converge here. Even in a bare recitation the words name objects that would otherwise be sitting on a tray in front of you.

Second, the verse asks for a certain steadiness in the face of its own register. It describes a woman drunk, flushed, wet with perfume, and it does so in the plain vocabulary of erotic court poetry rather than in symbols. The impulse to translate this immediately into something safer — to decide that the wine means bliss and stop there — costs the verse most of its force. The tradition does read mada as the bliss of union, but it reads it that way while leaving the literal picture standing, and the recitation is better for holding both at once.