Betel, pomegranate red, and five names on a single syllable

Tāmbūla is the betel quid: a leaf of the betel vine smeared with slaked lime, wrapped around slivers of areca nut and whatever else the household can afford — catechu, cardamom, clove, camphor — and chewed after eating. It stains the mouth and lips a deep red, which is why the name that follows it in this verse is about redness, and its offering is a fixed item of ritual. In the standard sequence of sixteen services by which a deity is honoured, tāmbūla comes near the end, after the food and before the closing acts, on the reasoning that a guest is given betel when the meal is over. Socially it belongs to the register of auspiciousness: it is what a married woman with a living husband is given at a gathering, and what someone in mourning or under a vow does without. To describe the goddess with her mouth full of it places her in that register unmistakably — not the ascetic, not the widow, but the wife of the house at the end of a meal. The hymn has mentioned betel once already, in an earlier verse describing her mouth, where the camphor in the roll is said to scent the directions; this second mention comes with no such elaboration, which is part of its effect.

Dāḍimī is the pomegranate, and the name specifies the flower rather than the fruit. Pomegranate blossom is a hot scarlet with orange in it, deeper than the pink of a lotus and quite different from the blood-red of hibiscus, which is the flower Kālī's iconography prefers. Red is this goddess's colour throughout: the meditation verse recited before the thousand names begins by calling her aruṇā, the red of dawn, and the tradition connects that redness to rajas, the constituent of activity, as against the white of purity and the dark of inertia. The choice of the pomegranate flower rather than any other red thing does what the betel did: it grounds an enormous claim in something a person has actually seen.

Mṛgākṣī, doe-eyed, is among the oldest compliments in Sanskrit and entirely conventional, which does not make it empty. The deer's eye is admired for being wide, dark, long at the outer corner and easily startled, and the poets use it for a glance that is alert without being hard.

Mohinī is the most loaded name in the verse. The root is muh, to be confused or to lose one's bearings, and moha is delusion, the thing the whole soteriology exists to remove. As a proper name it belongs to one of the best-known episodes in the Purāṇas. Gods and demons churn the ocean of milk with a mountain for a churning stick and the serpent Vāsuki for a rope; up come the poison that Śiva swallows, and the moon, and the goddess of fortune, and at last the physician of the gods holding the nectar of immortality. The demons seize it, and Viṣṇu takes the form of an irresistibly beautiful woman, Mohinī, who offers to divide it fairly and serves it to the gods alone. A later chapter has Śiva himself unable to look away from her. That the sahasranāma should apply the name to Lalitā makes a point it has made before with the noose in her hand: the power that deludes and the power that liberates are not two.

Mukhyā is from mukha, mouth or face, and means literally what is at the front — hence chief, principal, first. The first name of this same verse ends in mukhī, mouth, so the stanza uses one root twice for entirely different purposes. And in the analysis of language developed by the grammarians and the Mīmāṃsakas, mukhya is the technical term for a word's primary sense as against gauṇa, its secondary or figurative sense. A reader who knows that vocabulary will hear the name as saying that she is the literal meaning, not the metaphor.

Mṛḍānī is a formation, not a compound. Mṛḍa is a name of Śiva from a root meaning to be gracious — the same root behind the appeals for mercy addressed to Rudra in the oldest Śaiva liturgy — and the feminine adds the suffix Sanskrit reserves for the wives of a small closed list of gods. Pāṇini has a rule specifically for it, naming the stems that take it: Indra, Varuṇa, Bhava, Śarva, Rudra, Mṛḍa, and a few ordinary words such as maternal uncle and teacher. Indrāṇī, Bhavānī, Rudrāṇī and Mṛḍānī all come from that one rule, and the archaic ring the names have is a consequence of the formation being closed.

Mitrarūpiṇī ends the verse on a word that sounds ordinary and is not. Mitra is a friend, and it is also the Vedic god who presides over agreements — the Āditya paired with Varuṇa, whose name is cognate with the Iranian Mithra and derives from the idea of that which binds two parties. Friendship in this etymology is a contract before it is a feeling. Both senses are available in the last name of the verse, and after mohinī and mṛḍānī, the descent from enchantress to consort to friend is the shape the stanza has been making all along.

The second line is five names in sixteen syllables, all of them beginning with the labial m, and it is one of the more purely enjoyable lines in the hymn to say correctly. The count matters: mṛgākṣī, mohinī, mukhyā, mṛḍānī, mitrarūpiṇī — three syllables, three, two, three, five. Reciters who lose their place here almost always drop mukhyā, the short one in the middle.

Two of the five open with mṛ, the labial m followed by the vocalic ṛ, which is a syllable in its own right made with the tongue curled toward the roof of the mouth. It is not the mri of English, and it is not a schwa. Mṛgākṣī then adds the conjunct kṣ, one sound and not two, and mṛḍānī puts a retroflex ḍ where an English speaker will want a plain d — the tongue must strike further back. Dāḍimī in the line before has the same retroflex, so the two can be practised together.

There is a trap in the datives of this verse for anyone offering the names one at a time. The first name is tāmbūlapūritamukhī, an ī-stem, and gives tāmbūlapūritamukhyai. The fourth name of the second line is mukhyā, an ā-stem, and gives mukhyāyai. The two endings are one syllable apart and both contain mukhy, and the only defence is to know which stem you are dealing with. The rest are regular: dāḍimīkusumaprabhāyai, mṛgākṣyai, mohinyai, mṛḍānyai, mitrarūpiṇyai.

The first line has its own difficulties. Tāmbūla carries the cluster mb, a nasal closing directly into a voiced stop with no vowel between, and two long ū vowels follow in pūrita and in the name itself; the metre depends on those lengths. The kh of mukhī and mukhyā is a single aspirated guttural, k with breath, not k followed by a separate h. Prabhā ends the second name with pra and an aspirated bh, and the r in pra is a tap, brief and distinct.

In worship this verse falls near a natural point of correspondence. If the recitation is being done as part of an offering of the sixteen services, betel is one of the items actually presented, and a household that keeps the full ritual will have a leaf and a nut on the tray. The name is then not a description of something remote but a caption for what is on the plate in front of the reciter.

What the verse asks is a tolerance for descent. It comes immediately after the hymn has said that her form cannot be thought and that she kills Time, and it responds by describing her mouth, her colour and her eyes, and by ending on the word friend. A reader trained to think that religious language becomes more serious as it becomes more abstract will read this stanza as a relaxation. The tradition reads it the other way: having established that nothing can be predicated of her, the hymn is now free to predicate everything, and the least grand of the seven names here — she who takes the form of a friend — is the one that costs the reciter the most to accept.