Mother of two sons, and then nine words for what people want

The two sons come from different stories and are rarely as neatly paired as this compound pairs them. Kumāra, "the youth", is Skanda, born because the gods needed a general: the demon Tāraka could be killed only by a son of Śiva, and Śiva was in meditation and not producing sons. The classical version of the episode, which Kālidāsa made into the most admired long poem in Sanskrit, has Kāma shot at Śiva to break the trance and burnt to ash for his trouble, after which Pārvatī wins him by austerity instead. The child that follows is fostered by the six Kṛttikās, the stars of the Pleiades, and grows to command the divine army. Gaṇanātha, lord of the troops, is Gaṇeśa, and his origin is told several ways in several Purāṇas — formed by Pārvatī from the substance she rubbed off her own body while bathing, beheaded and given an elephant's head, set over Śiva's attendant hordes as their chief. The hymn is not adjudicating between the versions. It is asserting a relation: both of them are hers.

That matters because of where Gaṇeśa appears in this hymn's own narrative. The long Purāṇic account attached to the Lalitā tradition tells of her war against Bhaṇḍāsura, and at one point in it the demon's side deploys an engine of obstruction — a yantra whose whole function is to produce obstacles — and her army is stopped by it. Gaṇeśa is brought into being to break it, and the hymn has already named her, several hundred names back, as the one who rejoiced when he shattered the obstacle engine. So vighnanāśinī at the end of this verse is not a stray epithet borrowed from her son. It picks up an episode the reciter has already passed through, and it transfers the credit.

The long middle of the verse is best understood grammatically, because the grammar is what makes it possible. Sanskrit forms action-nouns from verbal roots with the suffix -ti, and every noun so formed is feminine. From the root meaning to be pleased comes tuṣṭi, being pleased; from the root meaning to thrive, puṣṭi; from the root meaning to think, mati; from the root meaning to hold firm, dhṛti; from the root meaning to grow quiet, śānti; from the root meaning to desire or be lovely, kānti. This is a completely ordinary piece of Sanskrit word-formation, the same machinery that gives gati, bhakti and mukti. What it means for a hymn to a goddess is that the language hands the poet a ready-made set of feminine nouns naming every good state a person can be in, so that the move from "she gives peace" to "she is Peace" requires no argument at all — only the removal of a verb.

The Purāṇas had already personified several of these. Genealogies of the sort found in the older Purāṇas list a series of daughters of Dakṣa given in marriage to Dharma, and the list includes Dhṛti, Tuṣṭi, Puṣṭi, Śānti and their sisters, each of whom is at once an abstraction and a wife with a name. The Devī Māhātmya then takes the decisive step of gathering them under a single goddess: its long litany salutes her as the one who abides in all beings in the form of contentment, in the form of peace, in the form of radiance, in the form of the mother. Our verse is doing the same thing more tersely, without the refrain and without the argument, on the assumption that the reciter already knows it.

Two of the ten names are built differently and are worth separating out. Svastimatī is not a compound but a possessive derivative: svasti, which is itself su plus asti, "it is well", the ancient word of blessing that stands at the head of countless inscriptions and gave its name to the mark called the svastika, with the suffix that means "having". She possesses wellbeing, which is a slightly different claim from being it — she has it to hold and therefore to give. The hymn has used the same formation earlier for peace. Nandinī comes from the root meaning to rejoice, the root that also gives ānanda; the same word names Vasiṣṭha's wish-granting cow in the Raghuvaṃśa, and something of that sense of a source one attends on and is fed by is not out of place here.

This verse is a test of pace. After the eight syllables of the first name, the reciter meets four two-syllable names in a row, and the natural tendency is to accelerate through them and arrive at the second line out of breath and ahead of the group. The names are short but they are not less. Give tuṣṭiḥ, puṣṭiḥ, matiḥ and dhṛtiḥ the same weight per syllable as the long compound that precedes them, and the line will keep its shape.

The most instructive feature of the verse for a learner is what happens to the endings. Each of those short names ends in a visarga when standing alone, but inside the verse the visarga meets a following voiced consonant and becomes r: what is written and chanted is puṣṭir matir dhṛtiḥ, with only the last one at the end of the line keeping its breath. The same happens in the second line with kāntir nandinī. This is the ordinary sandhi of visarga, and it is worth noticing because the nāmāvalī undoes it. When these names are used one by one for archanā they revert to their stems and take the dative of the i-declension: tuṣṭyai, puṣṭyai, matyai, dhṛtyai, śāntyai, kāntyai — six identical endings in a row, the i contracting to y before -ai.

On individual sounds: tuṣṭi and puṣṭi contain ṣṭ, a retroflex sibilant followed by a retroflex stop, both made with the tongue tip curled back and touching well behind the teeth. Dhṛti opens with a single aspirated dental followed by the vowel ṛ — a vowel, not a consonant cluster, held for the length of any other short vowel, and pronounced with a light r-colouring, closer to "ri" in southern recitation and to "ru" in much of the north. Vighnanāśinī has gh, one aspirated velar, immediately followed by n; keep it as a cluster rather than inserting a vowel, vigh-na, and make the ś palatal, further forward than English "sh".

Kumāragaṇanāthāmbā carries three long ās and a retroflex ṇ in gaṇa, and it ends in a join worth seeing: nātha plus ambā gives nāthāmbā, the two short as merging into one long ā. Because the whole thing is a single name it takes a single dative, kumāragaṇanāthāmbāyai, however long that makes it.

As to what the verse asks: it is the most straightforwardly petitionary passage in this stretch of the hymn, and there is no reason to be embarrassed about that. Someone reciting it is naming contentment, nourishment, clear thinking, steadfastness, peace, wellbeing, beauty and gladness — a fair summary of what most people would ask for if asked what they wanted. The hymn's answer to the awkwardness of wanting things from a deity is to identify the things with her. To ask her for peace is to say her name, and the verse arranges matters so that the request and the praise are the same utterance.

There is also a discipline in the ring the verse closes. It begins by calling her somebody's mother and ends by giving her that son's own title: what is asked for here is asked of the source rather than of an intermediary.