The slight smile, and the teacher's form

The word dara is the least conspicuous thing in the verse and the most carefully chosen. As the first member of a compound it means slightly, a little, barely — and classical poetry uses it constantly to mark something that has not yet fully arrived: daravikasita of a bud half open, daravilupta of a thing nearly effaced. Sanskrit has a graded vocabulary for laughter, from smita, the closed-lip smile, up through hasita and vihasita to aṭṭahāsa, the roaring laugh that Śākta literature gives to Kālī and to Bhairava in the cremation ground. This verse takes the quietest term on that scale and then damps it further with dara. What makes the name interesting is the verb attached to it: ujjvalat is the present participle of ud-√jval, to flare up, to blaze out. The smallest possible smile is given the strongest possible verb of light, and the disproportion is the whole content of the name.

Āndolita, in the first name, is the past participle of ā-√dul, to set swinging; āndolā is a swing, the kind hung from a branch, and the word survives in the Hindi and Marathi hindolā. Her long eyes are not darting; they are rocking, with the slow return of something suspended. Long eyes are a fixed convention of Indian description — eyes said to reach almost to the ears, compared to lotus petals or to fish — and the convention on its own would be unremarkable. The addition of a slight swaying turns a static feature into a gesture, and it is the gesture of a gaze that is taking in more than one thing.

Guru, the first word of the second line, is an ordinary adjective before it is a title: heavy, weighty, and in prosody a long syllable, the exact counterpart of laghu, light. It is cognate with Greek barys and Latin gravis. Alongside this plain etymology the tradition preserves a nirvacana, an interpretive word-splitting, which the Advayatāraka Upaniṣad states and the later Guru Gītā repeats: gu stands for darkness and ru for what removes it. In Śrīvidyā the guru is not an optional convenience. The fifteen-syllabled vidyā is transmitted, not acquired, and the ritual manuals have the practitioner worship the lineage of teachers — conventionally in three streams, the divine, the perfected and the human — before touching the worship of the goddess herself. Mūrti, from √mūrch, means a form that has solidified, and the name says something stronger than that she resembles the teacher: whoever is genuinely teaching is, for that duration, her congealed shape.

Nidhi is a hoard, specifically treasure buried in the ground, of the sort Kubera keeps; guṇa is first of all a strand of a rope, and only then a quality or a virtue. Both senses are live here. Read morally, the name says every good quality is deposited in her. Read through Sāṃkhya, where the three guṇas — sattva, rajas and tamas — are the three strands twisted together into the whole of unconscious nature, it says she is the store from which those strands are paid out. The commentators generally take the moral reading as primary and let the technical one stand behind it.

Go is one of the widest words in the language. It is a cow or an ox, and by extension the herd that constituted movable wealth in the Vedic economy; it is also a ray of light, which is why the sun is gopati; it is the earth; and it is the organ of sense, which is why the field of a sense faculty is its gocara. Mother of cattle is therefore the surface of the name and not its limit, and commentators generally allow the wider senses, so that she becomes the mother of the rays and of the senses that catch them. Behind the literal reading stands Surabhi, also called Kāmadhenu, the wish-granting cow drawn up in the churning of the ocean, whose descendants are the cattle of the world.

Guha is Skanda, the son born to Śiva and Pārvatī for one purpose, to lead the divine army against the demon Tāraka, whom no one already alive could kill. In the version Kālidāsa tells in the Kumārasambhava and the Purāṇas tell at greater length, Śiva's seed proved unbearable, passed through Agni, and was set down at last in a thicket of reeds — śara-vaṇa, from which he is Śaravaṇabhava — where the six Kṛttikās, the Pleiades, nursed the child, giving him six faces and the name Kārttikeya. Guha itself means the hidden one, from guhā, a cave or hiding place, and the name registers that he was born and reared out of sight. That same word guhā is the standard Upaniṣadic term for the cavity of the heart where the self is said to be lodged, and the ambiguity is not lost on readers of the hymn: the birthplace of Guha is also the ground of what is born in the cave. The name matters more in the South, where Skanda as Murugan has an independent and much older cult than the Sanskrit sources suggest, and this hymn is a South Indian text.

The verse is a regular anuṣṭubh, four feet of eight syllables, and the count is easy to verify: da-rā-ndo-li-ta-dī-rghā-kṣī, then da-ra-hā-so-jjva-la-nmu-khī. The break falls after the sixteenth syllable, at the end of the second name, which is also where the verse changes subject. Breathe there.

The two names of the first line begin identically and then diverge at the third syllable, and this is where reciters slip. Darāndolita has a long ā, because dara has combined with āndolita and short a plus long ā yields long ā; darahāsa keeps the short a of dara and puts the length on hāsa instead. Fix the difference by hearing it as darā- against dara-hā-, and the two will not collide.

Three clusters in the first line need separate attention. In āndolita the nd is dental throughout: the n closed at the teeth, the d released from the same position, with no intrusive vowel. In dīrghākṣī the rgh is a retroflex r followed by an aspirated velar — one sound with breath in it, not g plus h — and the kṣ that follows is the familiar velar-plus-retroflex-sibilant. Hardest is ujjvalat, where jj is a genuine double consonant: hold the first j closed and release the second, then let the v follow. English will want to reduce the whole cluster to a single j sound, and the metre will notice.

The second line runs four names together with two visarga sandhis. Gurumūrtiḥ and guṇanidhiḥ both end in visarga, and before the voiced consonant that follows each becomes r: gurumūrtir guṇanidhir gomātā. The final visarga of guhajanmabhūḥ, closing the verse, is a genuine breath after the long ū and should be sounded, faintly echoing the vowel before it.

For recitation as archanā, where each name is spoken in the dative followed by namaḥ, this verse is unusually instructive, because its six names use four different declensions. The two ī-stems of the first line take -yai: darāndolitadīrghākṣyai, darahāsojjvalanmukhyai. The two i-stems take -aye: gurumūrtaye, guṇanidhaye. Gomātā is an ṛ-stem and gives gomātre. Guhajanmabhūḥ is a ū-stem and gives guhajanmabhuve. A student who can produce all six from the nominatives has most of the noun system of the nāmāvalī in hand.

As for what the verse asks of the person chanting it: the first line trains attention downward, onto a movement almost too small to see and an expression that has barely formed. It is a corrective to the scale of the surrounding hymn, which has been dealing in cosmic offices for many verses. The second line then restores that scale, but by way of the teacher rather than the cosmos — which is to say that the route from the small thing observed to the large thing believed runs through a person who taught you.