Fire, a third eye, the garland of letters, the swan, and one plain word

Tejas comes from a root meaning to be sharp, and its earliest senses are the edge of a blade and the point of a flame. From there it spreads across everything that is keen, hot and bright: the fiery element in the body, the glow of good health, the authority that makes a king unopposable, the ascetic heat generated by austerity, and the brilliance of a face. It is not simply light. Sanskrit has other words for light. Tejas is light with force in it, and the possessive form here says she does not receive it from anywhere.

Three eyes are Śiva's oldest and most recognisable feature, and the goddess of this hymn has them because she and Śiva are two aspects of one thing rather than because she has borrowed his face. The tradition regularly reads the three as sun, moon and fire — the two eyes taking in the world as day and night take it in, and the third, set upright in the forehead, as the fire that ends what it looks at. That third eye is the one that opened on Kāma and reduced him to ash, an episode this hymn returns to more than once. It is worth holding both of the eye-names of this verse together: the third eye that destroys, and the restless, wandering eyes of Lolākṣī, whose name comes from lola, a word for anything that shakes, swings or will not stay put.

The grammar of the third name repays attention. Rūpiṇī is not simply "having a form"; with kāma before it the compound means taking whatever form one pleases, and it is one of the standard descriptions of a being not bound to a single shape. Kāmarūpa, form at will, is also the name of the region in the far northeast that holds the greatest of the goddess's seats, and a Sanskrit reader will hear the place-name behind the ability. The hymn gives kāmarūpiṇī again on its own, several hundred names later; here it is attached to a particular form she assumes. Which local goddess Lolākṣī is has been answered differently in different places, and the honest position is that the name has been attached to more than one shrine.

Mālinī is the most technical name in the verse and the easiest to underestimate. On the surface it means garlanded, from mālā, a wreath. But in tantric usage Mālinī is the name of a specific arrangement of the Sanskrit alphabet in which the vowels and consonants are not kept in their grammatical order but interwoven, as flowers of different kinds are interwoven in a garland. The regular order, called mātṛkā, runs the vowels first and then the consonants by place of articulation; the Mālinī order mixes them, and an entire scripture of the Śaiva tradition takes its name from her. The distinction matters in practice because the two orderings are used for different purposes in placing sounds on the body and in constructing mantras. A hymn that elsewhere calls her the very form of the letters is here calling her the garland they make when strung out of their expected sequence.

Haṃsa is a water bird — the word covers geese and swans and the poets do not much distinguish them — and it carries three separate loads of meaning. Poetically, the haṃsa is credited with the ability to drink the milk out of a mixture of milk and water, so that it stands for the discrimination that separates the real from what is mixed in with it. Philosophically, haṃsa is one of the oldest names for the self that moves through the worlds, and the Upaniṣads use it that way. And in yoga, haṃsa is the sound of breathing itself: ham going out and sa coming in, counted as a mantra that a person recites twenty-one thousand six hundred times a day without intending to, which is why it is called the unrecited recitation. All three senses are available in haṃsinī, and none of them excludes the others.

Then mātā, and then the mountain. Malaya is the southern stretch of the Western Ghats, the country that supplied sandalwood to the whole subcontinent; acala, "the unmoving", is one of the ordinary Sanskrit words for a mountain. Sanskrit poetry treats the Malaya breeze as the definitive fragrant wind, the south wind that comes off the sandal forests and unsettles anyone who is already in love. The placement is not accidental. Three verses earlier her limbs were smeared with sandal paste; here she is said to live on the range the sandal comes from. The hymn has moved from the substance to its source, which is a small instance of what it does at every scale.

Tejovatī contains a sandhi that explains a whole class of Sanskrit words. The stem is tejas; before the possessive suffix the final s becomes a visarga and then, after the vowel a, turns into o. That is the same change that gives manobhava from manas and payoda from payas, and hearing it once here makes dozens of other compounds transparent. The vowel in tejo- is long and should not be clipped toward the short o of English.

The verse contains an unusually clean demonstration of one of the most pervasive sound rules in Sanskrit. The suffix that makes feminine agent nouns is -inī with a dental n, and this verse uses it four times: mālinī, haṃsinī, vāsinī — and rūpiṇī, where the n has become retroflex ṇ. The reason is the r earlier in the word. An r or ṣ earlier in a word pulls a following n back to the retroflex position, and the change survives across intervening vowels and labials. Nothing else in the verse differs; the rule is doing all the work. Once a reciter has seen it here, the apparently arbitrary alternation between -inī and -iṇī across the whole hymn resolves into a single principle.

Lolākṣīkāmarūpiṇī is eight syllables and fills the back half of the first line. Trinayanā has a tapped r and two dental ns, made against the teeth, and its short a vowels must stay short or the metre collapses.

Haṃsinī is written with an anusvāra before the sibilant, and it should be produced as nasalisation carried on the vowel rather than as a separate n consonant closing the syllable: the air continues out through the nose while the mouth is already preparing the s. Reciters who make it into ham-si-nī with a hard labial closure are audibly overcorrecting.

The trap in this verse is mātā. Every instinct trained by the rest of the hymn says the dative will be mātāyai; it is not. Mātā is the nominative of an ṛ-stem, the same declension as pitṛ and dātṛ, and its dative is mātre. Anyone using the names one at a time for offerings will get this wrong at first; say it aloud in isolation — mātre namaḥ — before the habit of -āyai hardens around it.

Malayācalavāsinī has a join at malaya plus acala, two short as combining into one long ā. Say malayā-cala, not malaya-acala, and the eight syllables come out right.

The second line offers a memory aid: three of its four names begin with m, and the fourth, haṃsinī, sits second, so the pattern is m, h, m, m. In a hymn where losing one's place is the commonest failure, a shape like that is worth having.

What the verse asks is quieter than what it says. Two of its names describe the breath and the plain fact of being someone's child, and both of them are available in the middle of recitation without any preparation. The swan is the sound the reciter is already making between the names; the mother is the word that needs no commentary and gets none here. After a long stretch of technical and iconographic vocabulary, the hymn briefly stops asking to be understood and offers something a person can simply say.