The rod of law, the space in the heart, the round of lunar days

Deveśī is devī combined with īśī, mistress. Deva is built on √div, to shine, and the shining ones of the Vedic pantheon are not, in this literature, self-sufficient. The political theology of the Śākta texts is stated most memorably in the Devī Māhātmya, where the gods, defeated and dispossessed, pool their concentrated energies and what emerges from the pooling is a goddess who does what none of them could do individually. Deveśa is a common epithet of Śiva and of Viṣṇu; the feminine deveśī takes the title over intact. It should be read against the name that follows rather than as a piece of ordinary praise, because the two together make an argument: she rules the gods, and she is also present in the arrangements by which people rule each other.

Daṇḍanīti is a precise technical term and not a poetic phrase. Daṇḍa is the rod — a staff, and by extension the punishment administered with it — and nīti is guidance or the conduct of affairs. In the classical scheme of learning set out at the opening of the Arthaśāstra, daṇḍanīti is one of the four sciences a king must know, alongside philosophy, the Vedic corpus, and economics; it is the science of coercion, which is to say of government as such. Behind it lies the doctrine of mātsyanyāya, the law of the fishes: were the rod not wielded, the strong would swallow the weak as the big fish swallows the small, and the whole of political order exists to prevent this. Sthā, standing, is the operative word in the name. She does not hold the rod and she does not merely approve of law; she stands within the science itself, so that the coercive apparatus of the state, when it is exercised justly, is a place where she is found. The tradition that calls her Rājarājeśvarī, sovereign over sovereigns, is drawing on the same instinct. It is worth pausing over how rare this kind of name is in a hymn otherwise occupied with cosmology and interior practice.

The third name reaches for the Upaniṣads directly. Dahara means small, fine, subtle, and daharākāśa — the tiny space — is the technical designation of a teaching given in the eighth chapter of the Chāndogya Upaniṣad, where the pupil is directed to a small lotus-shaped chamber within the city of brahman that is the body, and to the small space within that chamber, and is told to seek what is inside it. The text then makes the claim on which everything turns: that space within the heart is as large as the space out there, and heaven and earth, fire and wind, sun and moon, lightning and the stars are all gathered into it. The dahara-vidyā became one of the standard meditations of the Vedānta tradition, and the Brahmasūtra devotes an entire section of its first chapter to arguing that the small space in question is neither the physical cavity nor the element ether but brahman itself. Śrīvidyā inherits the teaching and locates its internal worship there: the antaryāga, the offering made without material substances, is performed in the lotus of the heart, and the practitioner who has been taught to see the Śrīcakra internally sees it in that space. Calling her daharākāśarūpiṇī identifies the goddess with the container rather than with anything found inside it.

The last name is a calendar. A tithi is a lunar day, the interval in which the moon gains or loses twelve degrees on the sun, and the bright fortnight runs fifteen of them: pratipad, the first day after the new moon, through to the full moon. Rākā is the old Vedic name for the full moon night, personified as a goddess and invoked in the Ṛgveda alongside Sinīvālī, Kuhū and Anumati, the deities of the other phases; her presence here is a small piece of very old vocabulary surviving in a comparatively late hymn. What Śrīvidyā makes of the fifteen days is the doctrine of the nityās, the eternal goddesses, one for each tithi of the waxing fortnight, beginning with Kāmeśvarī and ending with Citrā, and corresponding one to one with the fifteen syllables of the pañcadaśākṣarī. Lalitā is the sixteenth, the digit that never wanes, and the arithmetic of fifteen-plus-one is one of the organising ideas of the school. The name is a passive participle, so the tithis are the worshippers and not the occasions: the lunar days themselves, personified, are performing the worship. That the hymn should move immediately in the following verse to kalā, the digit of the moon, shows that the lunar theme has been deliberately begun here.

The arithmetic of this verse is unusually clean and worth using as a mnemonic. Deveśī is three syllables and daṇḍanītisthā is five, which fills the first foot exactly; daharākāśarūpiṇī is eight and fills the second; the final name is sixteen and fills the whole second line. Nothing else needs to be remembered about the shape of the verse.

The e of deveśī is always long in Sanskrit — there is no short e — so both syllables are held, and the ś is the palatal sibilant, the tongue near the hard palate, not the retroflex ṣ. In daṇḍanītisthā the ṇḍ is retroflex: the tongue curls back and touches behind the ridge for both consonants, and English speakers habitually make them dental instead, which turns the rod of the law into something else. Two syllables later sthā requires the tongue to come forward again for a dental s followed by an aspirated dental th, all before the long ā. The name is a small exercise in moving between the two positions.

Daharākāśarūpiṇī has a feature worth understanding rather than memorising. The final ṇ is retroflex, and it is retroflex because of the r earlier in rūpa: a preceding r or ṣ in the same word converts a following n to ṇ. The same rule accounts for rūpiṇī, kāriṇī and hundreds of other feminines in the hymn, and once you have seen it you will stop treating each one as a separate spelling to be learned. Note also that the ś in ākāśa is palatal while the s in the fourth name's sevitā-type endings is dental; the hymn keeps all three sibilants in play and rewards keeping them distinct.

The long name cannot be broken for breath, because it is one word and one name, so the breath has to be taken before it. Learn it in four pieces and then join them without a seam: pratipanmukhya, rākānta, tithimaṇḍala, pūjitā. The first piece hides a sandhi that explains its odd shape — the word is pratipad, ending in d, and before the m of mukhya that d becomes the corresponding nasal n, giving pratipanmukhya. Sanskrit does this routinely at compound joins, and recognising it here saves you from mislearning the stem.

For archanā the four names take the datives deveśyai, daṇḍanītisthāyai, daharākāśarūpiṇyai, and pratipanmukhyarākāntatithimaṇḍalapūjitāyai, the last of which is among the longest single utterances in the nāmāvalī and is a genuine test of breath control. Practise it slowly at first with the four pieces marked, then at speed, and do not let the ending collapse: the -āyai must remain two distinct syllables.

What the verse asks of the reciter is a change of scale performed three times in nine seconds. It begins in the assembly of the gods, drops into the courts and offices of a kingdom, contracts without warning into a space inside the chest, and opens again onto the moon. Nothing in the Sanskrit smooths these transitions; the names are simply set next to each other. The traditional response is not to resolve the jumps but to let the third name absorb the others, since the Upaniṣadic teaching it points to says precisely that the heaven and the earth are already inside the small space. Chanted on a particular tithi — and many practitioners do keep the fortnight — the last name also has the effect of locating the recitation on a specific day of an ongoing cycle rather than in general time.