Millions of Lakṣmīs, then a moon and a rainbow

Kaṭākṣa is the sidelong look, the glance thrown from the outer corner of the eye, and in the poetry of this tradition it is not a decorative gesture but the operative instrument. What she does, she does by looking; the literature is full of the claim that a single glance suffices for what nothing else can accomplish. The word is a compound of kaṭa, the temple or side of the head, and akṣa, the eye, so it means literally the eye turned to the side.

Kiṅkarī is worth pausing over. A kiṃkara is a servant, and the Sanskrit lexicographers derive the word transparently from the question kiṃ karomi, what shall I do — the attendant defined by standing ready and asking for instructions. The feminine kiṅkarī is the handmaid. The compound then says that the glance did not summon servants but converted them: kiṅkarībhūta, become-a-handmaid, with the abstract-forming suffix that turns a noun into a state something enters. They were goddesses of fortune, and after the look they are staff.

Kamalā is a name of Lakṣmī, from kamala, the lotus, on which she stands and which she holds. Lakṣmī is the object of the Śrī Sūkta, an early hymn appended to the Ṛgveda rather than belonging to its body, and of a very large part of the devotional practice of ordinary households, where she is petitioned for exactly what her name promises: gold, cattle, food, good fortune. Koṭi is ten million, and it is the standard Sanskrit hyperbole for a number too large to matter. Placing ten million of her in service is a theological claim made without any theological vocabulary, and it is the same claim the tradition makes when it calls its own vidyā the auspicious one, śrīvidyā, in the verse immediately preceding: prosperity is not the goal of this practice but a by-product it has in abundance.

With śiraḥsthitā the hymn moves to a different kind of statement. She is placed in the head — and the sequence that begins here runs through the brow to the heart in the following verse, each station given a light of its own. This is the vocabulary of the internal disciplines, in which the practitioner locates a deity at specified points in the body and holds attention there. The moon at the crown belongs to a standard scheme in which the cool lunar nectar is stored at the top of the head and the sun burns lower down; the Saundaryalaharī describes an ascent through the body that terminates in the thousand-petalled lotus at the crown, and the crown is where Śrīvidyā's internal yoga also ends. Candranibhā simply says her appearance is that of the moon, and the choice of comparison brings with it coolness and whiteness as much as brightness.

The rainbow at the forehead is harder to place. Indradhanus, Indra's bow, is the ordinary Sanskrit word for a rainbow, and behind it lies the Vedic image of the sky-god's weapon appearing in the storm. What a rainbow contributes that the moon does not is multiplicity: it is not one colour but a band of them, and prabhā, radiance, is here the radiance of something refracted. The hymn does not explain the choice, and it is worth resisting the temptation to force it into the tidy triad of moon, sun and fire that governs much of the surrounding literature — the brow simply gets a rainbow, and the meditation is asked to see a spectrum there rather than a single hue.

One textual matter deserves notice. The second line prints bhālasthendradhanuḥprabhā as a single word, because the final ā of bhālasthā and the initial i of indradhanuḥprabhā combine by ordinary sandhi into e. Two names are therefore concealed inside one written form. Divisions of this kind are where the count of exactly one thousand is decided, and different nāmāvalīs occasionally cut the text at different points; the reading followed here treats bhālasthā and indradhanuḥprabhā as separate names, which is the usual practice.

Sixteen syllables is a long time to be without a breath, and the first line of this verse is one name. Do not attempt it as a single sound. Break it where the meaning breaks: kaṭākṣa, the glance; kiṅkarī, handmaid; bhūta, become; kamalā, Lakṣmī; koṭi, ten million; sevitā, served by. Six pieces, learned as six, and then run together at speed. Reciters who try to memorise the syllables in order rather than the words in order almost always lose the middle of it.

The cluster ṅk in kiṅkarī is one of the few Sanskrit conjuncts an English speaker already owns: ṅ is the guttural nasal in sink and finger, made at the same place as k, and it is written with its own letter in Devanagari. The kṣ of kaṭākṣa is guttural k running straight into retroflex ṣ. Both ṭ sounds in the line, in kaṭākṣa and koṭi, are retroflex, made with the tongue tip curled back, and they are the same sound as in trikūṭā and kāmakoṭikā in the verse before.

The second line contains two visargas, and this verse is a good place to learn to say them. A visarga is a voiceless breath that carries a faint echo of the vowel before it, so śiraḥ ends with something like a whispered ha, and dhanuḥ with a whispered hu. In both places here the visarga stands before a voiceless consonant and is retained rather than transformed, which is why the printed text keeps it: śiraḥsthitā, indradhanuḥprabhā. Do not swallow them. A dropped visarga is the commonest single fault in recitation by learners, and the two in this line are exposed enough to be heard.

Sthi and sthā, in śiraḥsthitā and bhālasthā, are dental s followed by an aspirated dental th: the tongue stays at the teeth and there is a distinct puff of breath. In candranibhā the cluster ndra is three consonants — dental n, dental d, then r — and it recurs immediately in indradhanuḥ, so the line gives you the same difficulty twice within four syllables.

The archanā needs care here, because the written line hides a boundary. The offerings are kaṭākṣakiṅkarībhūtakamalākoṭisevitāyai, śiraḥsthitāyai, candranibhāyai, bhālasthāyai and indradhanuḥprabhāyai — five, not four. Anyone who learned the verse from the running text and never saw it divided will tend to offer bhālasthendradhanuḥprabhāyai as a single name and finish the thousand one short.

As for what the verse asks: the change of scale between its two lines is the whole of it. The first line is external, public and enormous, a throne room with ten million attendants in it. The second is interior, private and small, and it asks the reciter to put attention at the top of the head and then at the space between the brows and to find a particular quality of light at each. Reciting the two at the same speed and in the same tone flattens the verse. It is better to let the first line run and then slow, so that the shift from a crowd to a coordinate is audible.