Digits of the moon, the pleasure of poetry, the two attendants

Kalā is one of those Sanskrit words whose spread is the whole point. Its basic sense is a small part, and specifically a sixteenth: the moon is reckoned in sixteen digits, of which fifteen wax through the bright fortnight and wane through the dark, while the sixteenth is held never to diminish at all. That unwaning digit, the amā-kalā, is a standing image in Śākta and Śaiva writing for what remains when everything measurable has been subtracted, and it is why the śrīvidyā of sixteen syllables is called Ṣoḍaśī, the sixteenth. From the astronomical sense the word extends to time — the older reckonings divide the day into kāṣṭhās, kalās and muhūrtas — and from measured skill to art in general, which yields the traditional list of sixty-four kalās, the accomplishments of a cultivated person, catalogued by Vātsyāyana among others and running from singing and painting to garland-making and the composition of riddles. In Śaiva and Śākta metaphysics kalā is further a technical term: the fivefold division of the emanated cosmos into kalās in the Siddhānta systems, and in the Kashmirian schools kalā as one of the five sheaths that contract the unlimited agency of consciousness into the limited capacity of an individual. Any of these can be heard in kalātmikā, and the commentators generally decline to choose.

Kalānāthā deserves a note of its own. Kalānātha in the masculine is an ordinary poetic name for the moon, the lord of the digits. The feminine form therefore does two things at once: it says she rules the digits, and it lets her occupy, in the feminine, the position the moon occupies. The pair of names — she is made of them, she rules them — is a structure the sahasranāma uses repeatedly, and it corresponds to a real doctrinal difficulty. If the goddess is the material of the world, she cannot stand outside it to govern it; if she governs it, she is not simply identical with it. The hymn does not resolve this. It states both and moves on, which is closer to the practice of the Upaniṣads than to that of the systematic philosophers.

Kāvyālāpavinodinī rewards being taken apart. Kāvya is what a kavi makes; and kavi, in the Vedic language, does not mean poet but seer, one who perceives what is hidden, so that the classical word for poetry carries an older claim about vision inside it. Ālāpa is speaking, conversation, and in music the unmetred opening in which a rāga is unfolded. Vinodinī comes from vi-√nud, to push away: a vinoda is literally a driving-off, of tedium, and so a diversion or pastime. Put together the name says that poetry spoken aloud is what she does to pass the time — a startlingly light word to use of a supreme deity, and continuous with the older idea that the world itself is her play. The tradition takes the name as a promise as much as a description, which is why poets have addressed her: the goddess Śyāmalā, also called Mātaṅgī, who in this school is Lalitā's minister and the presiding power of speech and music, is the object of a much-loved Daṇḍaka traditionally attributed to Kālidāsa, and the association of poetic gift with the goddess's favour is one of the durable convictions of Sanskrit literary culture.

The long final name is an icon rendered in words. A cāmara is a whisk made from the tail of the yak, and it belongs, with the parasol and the lion-throne, to the standard equipment of kingship; two attendants waving cāmaras on either side is how a South Indian sculptor signals that the central figure is a sovereign. The attendants named here are not minor figures. Ramā, from √ram, to delight, is Lakṣmī, and Vāṇī is speech herself, Sarasvatī. In the Lalitopākhyāna of the Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa, the narrative frame in which this hymn is embedded, the goddess is described in just such a court, and the sahasranāma is elsewhere careful to give her a full administration with ministers and a commander of forces. The compound pairs ramā-vāṇī with savya-dakṣiṇa, left and right, and Sanskrit convention reads two such lists in corresponding order, so that Ramā stands at the left and Vāṇī at the right; this is the reading the standard glosses take, though the placement is a matter on which the iconographic tradition is not perfectly uniform. Doctrinally the arrangement matters more than the sides. Prosperity and eloquence, the two goods most often asked of heaven, are shown here already in service, which is a way of saying that whoever has reached her has passed the point where they need to be requested.

The first line is held together by the letter k: kalātmikā, kalānāthā, kāvyālāpavinodinī, five velar stops in eight beats. Let each of them be a clean unaspirated k, made at the back of the mouth with no puff of breath after it — the English k of key has an aspiration that Sanskrit reserves for kh, and using it here turns kalā into something the ear registers as a different word.

In kalātmikā the cluster tm asks the tongue to move from the teeth to the lips with nothing in between: dental t released directly into m, no vowel smuggled in. Kāvyālāpa is a single long stretch of open vowels interrupted by one cluster, vy, and it hides a join — kāvya plus ālāpa, where the final a and the initial ā merge into the long ā you hear. Knowing that keeps you from mislearning the second element as lāpa.

As in the previous verse, the entire second line is one sixteen-syllable name, and it contains the single most treacherous sequence in this stretch of the hymn. Sacāmara ends in ra and ramā begins with ra, so the compound gives -ra-ra- in the middle: sacāmara-ramā. Under speed one of the two disappears and almost nobody notices. Slow the name down at that point deliberately, or count the syllables — sa-cā-ma-ra-ra-mā-vā-ṇī-sa-vya-da-kṣi-ṇa-se-vi-tā, sixteen — until the doubling is secure.

The ṇ of vāṇī and the ṇ of dakṣiṇa are both retroflex, tongue curled back, and the n sounds of vinodinī in the line above are dental. Alternating the two correctly across the verse is a better ear-training exercise than any drill on isolated syllables. The kṣ of dakṣiṇa is the familiar velar plus retroflex sibilant, and sa-vya requires the v and y to be pronounced as a genuine cluster rather than as two syllables.

For archanā the datives are kalātmikāyai, kalānāthāyai, kāvyālāpavinodinyai, and sacāmararamāvāṇīsavyadakṣiṇasevitāyai. The first two are straightforward ā-stems; the third is an ī-stem and contracts to -inyai; the last, like the long name of the preceding verse, has to be taken in one breath, and it is worth breathing deliberately before beginning it rather than discovering halfway through that you cannot finish.

Two things the verse asks of the person chanting it. The first is visual. This is a dhyāna verse in everything but name, and the traditional response to it is to compose the scene: the seated figure, the two women standing at either side, the whisks moving. Recitation in this tradition is not only auditory, and a verse that gives you a tableau expects you to build it.

The second is more pointed. The third name says that the recitation of poetry is her pastime, and the hymn being recited is itself poetry, recited aloud. The person chanting is therefore not describing an activity she enjoys elsewhere; they are performing it. Of all the names in this part of the stotra, kāvyālāpavinodinī is the one that most directly describes what is happening in the room while it is being said.