Soft arms on the great mountain, and an empire

Kailāsa is a real mountain, a peak of roughly six and a half thousand metres in what is now western Tibet, north of the Himālayan range proper and unclimbed by consent. It is circumambulated by Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and adherents of Bön. In Sanskrit literature it is the seat of Śiva and Pārvatī, the place from which the epics and Purāṇas repeatedly begin a scene; Kubera's city of Alakā is set in its neighbourhood, which is why Kālidāsa's cloud is sent there; and it is the mountain Rāvaṇa is said to have tried to lift, until Śiva pressed it down with a toe and pinned him under it for an age.

The hymn says mahākailāsa, the great Kailāsa, and the qualifier is doing work. The commentators generally take it to mark off a Kailāsa that is not the geographical one, on the reasonable ground that the goddess of this tradition is elsewhere given a quite different address: an island of gems in an ocean of nectar, or the city of Śrīpura on the summit of Meru, described at length in the Lalitopākhyāna of the Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa. A further reading, widely current in the practice literature, identifies mahākailāsa with the sahasrāra, the thousand-petalled centre at the crown of the head where the ascent of the internal yoga terminates, so that the great Kailāsa is above the ordinary one in the same way that the crown is above the body. These readings are not rivals in the tradition's own view; the point of the qualifier is that whatever Kailāsa is, hers is the one it is a copy of.

Mṛṇāla is the fibrous inner thread of the lotus stalk, and it is one of the fixed similes of Sanskrit poetry, used for anything pale, cool and yielding. Court poets have their heroines wear bracelets and garlands of lotus fibre to cool the fever of separation, and the comparison of a woman's arm to a mṛṇāla is old enough by the classical period to be a convention rather than an observation. Dorlatā compounds dos, the arm, with latā, a creeper — the arm-as-vine, another stock figure, carrying the sense of something slender that curves and clings. What is notable is not the imagery, which any reader of kāvya has met a hundred times, but its position. The sahasranāma performs its physical description of the goddess near the beginning, working downwards from the hair, and by the five hundred and seventy-ninth name that business is long finished. The body returns here, unannounced, in the middle of a run of abstractions, and it returns as softness.

Mahanīyā looks like a third mahā- name in a verse that already has two, and it is not. It is a gerundive of the verbal root √mah, to make great, to magnify, to honour — an old root, at home in the Vedic hymns, from which mahat and mahiman also descend. The suffix -anīya forms the future passive participle: to be honoured, deserving honour. Sanskrit gerundives carry a flavour of obligation, and the difference between saying that someone is admirable and saying that someone is to be admired is the difference this name depends on.

Dayā is sympathy, the impulse to spare, the feeling that arises at the sight of suffering; mūrti is solid form, and it is the ordinary word for the image in a shrine. The compound is a karmadhāraya in which the two members are in apposition, so it does not say that she has compassion, or that compassion is one of her attributes, but that compassion is what she is shaped as — the form is the pity, and there is no residue of her left over that might be indifferent. The Devī Māhātmya makes the same identification in its long litany of the goddess who abides in all beings as consciousness, as hunger, as shame, as sleep, and, in one of the verses, as compassion.

Sāmrājya belongs to the old vocabulary of kingship. It is the abstract noun from samrāj, the paramount sovereign of the Vedic royal consecrations, and the ritual literature distinguishes it carefully from ordinary rule: a rājan governs a kingdom, a samrāj governs kings. The Śrīvidyā tradition takes that political vocabulary literally and builds a court around her, with a minister, a commander of the army and a walled capital, an apparatus most fully described in the Bhaṇḍāsura narrative. Śālin, the ending, comes from a root meaning to be eminent and means furnished with, abounding in; it is used of a person who wears a quality the way one wears a garment. The verse therefore ends by saying not that empire was given to her but that she is amply supplied with it, and the soft arms three names earlier are what keep that from being merely a claim about power.

The hardest thing in this verse is the second name, and it is hard in an interesting way. Mṛṇālamṛdudorlatā contains the vocalic ṛ twice in its first four syllables, both times after m. The ṛ is a vowel, held for one short beat, made with the tongue curled towards the roof of the mouth; it is not the sequence ri, and English speakers who substitute ri will find the word collapses. Then notice that the ṇ of mṛṇāla is retroflex, and it is retroflex precisely because of the ṛ that precedes it. The same rule turned the n of sākṣiṇī retroflex two verses ago. Saying mṛ-ṇā-la slowly, feeling the tongue stay curled from the vowel into the nasal, is the most efficient drill for this sound in the whole hymn.

Dorlatā hides a sandhi. The word for arm is dos, ending in s; before the voiced l of latā that s becomes r, giving dor-latā. The same transformation governs the join between the third and fourth names, where dayāmūrtiḥ before mahā- yields dayāmūrtir mahāsāmrājyaśālinī, run together without a pause. If you learned the previous verses you have met this rule already at bhaktanidhir niyantrī. Sanskrit does this consistently, and once you stop being surprised by it the printed line becomes easy to read aloud.

Mahāsāmrājyaśālinī has two clusters worth isolating. Mrā is labial m followed immediately by r, with no vowel between them; and jya is the voiced palatal j followed by the palatal glide y, both made at the same place in the mouth, so the tongue does not move between them. The three long ās in mahāsāmrājya must all be given their length or the eight-syllable quarter will not fill out.

In the archanā the five become mahākailāsanilayāyai, mṛṇālamṛdudorlatāyai, mahanīyāyai, dayāmūrtyai and mahāsāmrājyaśālinyai. Dayāmūrtyai repays a moment's attention if you noticed the oddity of bhaktanidhaye in the earlier verse. Mūrti and nidhi are both i-stems, but mūrti is feminine and takes the feminine dative in -yai, while nidhi is masculine and keeps -aye. The hymn does not regularise them, and the two forms sitting a few verses apart are as clear a lesson in Sanskrit gender as any grammar will give you.

What the verse asks of the reciter is chiefly a refusal to choose. There is a persistent impulse, when a hymn puts imperial sovereignty and lotus-fibre arms in the same four lines, to treat one of them as the real content and the other as ornament — to hear the softness as poetic decoration attached to a serious claim about power, or to hear the empire as a metaphor attached to a serious claim about tenderness. The verse gives no warrant for either. It states an address, a physical quality, an obligation, an identity and a status, in that order, at the same level of seriousness, and the middle term is the one that makes the sequence more than a list. A recitation that slows at mṛṇālamṛdudorlatā rather than hurrying through it to reach the grander names is reciting the verse the composer wrote.