First in the reckoning, unthinkable in form, and the slayer of Time

Agragaṇyā is built from agra, the front or tip, and gaṇya, to be counted, from the root gaṇ that also gives gaṇita, calculation. The idiom is of precedence in a reckoning, and precedence was not an abstraction in this culture. Who receives the first honour at a public rite was a question people fought over; the Mahābhārata gives a famous passage to Śiśupāla's objection when Kṛṣṇa is given the first worship at Yudhiṣṭhira's consecration, and the argument ends in a killing. To call her agragaṇyā is to settle that question in advance. What makes the name interesting is what stands next to it. Acintyarūpā says that her form is not to be thought — a plain apophatic claim of the kind the Upaniṣads make when they say that the mind does not think it but it is that by which the mind is thought. The two names together produce a peculiar object: something that occupies the first position in an enumeration of things none of which can be enumerated with it. The tradition does not treat this as a flaw. Ranking her first is a statement about worship, not about a scale of magnitudes, and the second name is there to prevent the first from being taken as a comparison.

Kali is the last of the four world ages and the shortest, and the four take their names from the throws of dice: kṛta the winning cast of four, then tretā the three, dvāpara the two, and kali the losing single. The image is exact and unsentimental — the age we are in is the one where the throw came up worst. The Purāṇas describe it as an era in which lifespan, strength, memory and truthfulness are all reduced, and in which dharma, pictured as a bull, stands on one leg. Kalmaṣa is stain, dirt, defilement, a physical word used morally. What makes kalikalmaṣanāśinī more than a routine claim is the doctrine attached to the age. The Purāṇas hold that the practices suited to earlier ages are beyond the capacity of people now, and that the one means left, which is also the easiest and the most powerful, is the recitation of the names of God. On that doctrine a hymn of a thousand names is not one devotional exercise among others but the prescribed remedy for the specific disease of this era, and the name in this verse says exactly that.

Kātyāyanī is one of the oldest independent names in this stretch of the hymn. Formally it is a feminine patronymic from Kātyāyana, a descendant of Kata, and the Purāṇic story explains it accordingly: the goddess took birth in the hermitage of the sage Kātyāyana, formed from the combined splendour of all the gods, in order to kill the buffalo demon Mahiṣa. That story, told at length in the Devī Māhātmya, is the founding narrative of the goddess as a single power assembled from the many, and Kātyāyanī is the sixth of the nine forms invoked on the nine nights of Navarātri. The name has other lives too. A Kātyāyanī is one of the two wives of Yājñavalkya in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, the one who is not given the philosophical dialogue. And in the Bhāgavata the unmarried cowherd girls of Vraja keep a vow to Kātyāyanī to obtain Kṛṣṇa as a husband, which fixed her in Vaiṣṇava literature as the deity a young woman petitions.

Kālahantrī answers the last name of the previous verse. There she was asked to ward death off; here she strikes down Time itself, kāla being the word for both. The model is Śaiva. Mārkaṇḍeya, fated to die at sixteen, clings to the liṅga as Yama's noose falls on him, and Śiva bursts out of the stone and destroys Death on the spot — the episode that gives Śiva the iconographic form of the ender of Time. The feminine of kāla is kālī, and the relation between the two words is one that Śākta texts return to constantly: she is what devours the devourer. Notice that the claim is stronger than immortality. To be undying is to be exempt from time; to kill time is to remove the frame within which anything can be early or late.

Kamalākṣa, lotus-eyed, is a standard epithet of Viṣṇu, and the commentators take the name that way. Placing him in the posture of an attendant is a move this hymn makes repeatedly with figures the audience already reveres, and it has a specific point in a Śākta text. In the Devī Māhātmya it is Viṣṇu who lies asleep on the cosmic waters while Brahmā, threatened by two demons, praises the goddess of sleep — and Viṣṇu cannot wake until she consents to leave him. The tradition's position is not that Viṣṇu is a lesser god but that his activity is hers, and a name of this kind is how a hymn says so without polemic. In a South Indian setting where Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava communities were often in open competition, the ecumenical courtesy of the name is worth noticing: it takes the preserver into her court rather than arguing with him.

The first line hides a word-boundary that costs reciters a name. Agragaṇyā and acintyarūpā are two separate names, but the final long ā of the first swallows the initial a of the second, and the loss is marked only by the avagraha, the small sign in the printed text that indicates an elided a. Chanted, the line runs agragaṇyā-cintyarūpā with no audible seam at all, and someone counting names by ear will find one where there are two. Know in advance that the line is two names and four ka-names follow.

Agragaṇyā also contains the retroflex ṇ before y, the same articulation met in puṇya two verses earlier: the tongue curls back for the nasal, then releases into the palatal glide. Acintyarūpā has the cluster ntya, three articulations — dental n, dental t, palatal y — with no vowel between them; say a-cin-tya-rū-pā and resist the urge to insert one.

The second and third lines of names are an exercise in the guttural k. Kalikalmaṣanāśinī puts three k sounds and two l sounds into eight syllables, and the difficulty is the cluster lma, a dental l followed directly by a labial m. The ṣ of kalmaṣa is retroflex, made with the tongue curled back, and is a different sound from the palatal ś of nāśinī later in the same word; they fall close enough together to be a useful drill in telling them apart.

Kātyāyanī opens with a long ā followed by the cluster tyā, also long. Kālahantrī ends in ntrī, four articulations in one syllable — n, t, r, ī — and the r must be sounded as its own tap rather than being absorbed into the vowel. Kamalākṣaniṣevitā contains kṣa, which is a single conjunct and not two syllables, and then a piece of internal sandhi worth understanding: the word is ni plus sevita, and the s becomes retroflex ṣ because of the i before it. The same rule accounts for many of the retroflex sibilants that seem arbitrary elsewhere in the hymn.

For the sequential offering, the ā-stems give agragaṇyāyai, acintyarūpāyai and kamalākṣaniṣevitāyai; the ī-stems give kalikalmaṣanāśinyai and kātyāyanyai; and kālahantrī, which is the feminine of an agent noun in -tṛ, gives kālahantryai.

What the verse asks is partly a matter of where the reciter stands in time. This is one of the few places where the hymn names the present age, and it names it as the thing being cleaned off. The doctrine behind the name holds that recitation is not merely permitted in this age but is the practice appropriate to it, prescribed precisely because everything more demanding has become impossible. That is a consoling teaching and also a demanding one: it removes every excuse about unfitness, since the remedy has been reduced to something a person can do out loud, in whatever condition they are in. The verse then makes it harder again. Between the age's filth and the lotus-eyed attendant it has placed a name that says her form cannot be thought, so the reciter is not to imagine that having a practice suited to the times amounts to having comprehended what the practice is directed at.