Three syllables, fragrance, vermilion, and the mountain's daughter

Akṣara means syllable, and it means it by way of an etymology the tradition never lets go of: a-kṣara, that which does not wear away, the imperishable. It is therefore also one of the standard words for the absolute. Tryakṣarī, she of three syllables, identifies the goddess with a specific short mantra, and the reading most often given takes it as the three-syllabled vidyā of Bālā, the goddess in her form as a young girl, whose middle seed the hymn has just uttered in the preceding verse. Others take the three syllables as the constituents of om, which the Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad analyses into a, u and m and correlates with waking, dream and deep sleep. Both readings are available and neither excludes the other; what they share is the assumption that a mantra of a few sounds is not a shortened form of something longer but a complete body.

Gandha is smell, and in ritual it is the first of the material offerings: sandal paste applied to the image, given before flowers, incense and lamp in the standard sequence of services. Āḍhya is a commercial word — wealthy, well supplied — so the compound says she is rich in the way a merchant is rich, only in scent. Behind the name lies an old convention about how divine bodies are recognised. The Mahābhārata, in the story of Nala and Damayantī, has the gods betray themselves by four signs: they do not sweat, their garlands stay fresh, their eyes do not blink, and their feet do not quite touch the ground. Fragrance belongs to this family of markers, an atmosphere rather than a feature, and it is the one that a worshipper can supply for herself with a spoonful of sandal paste.

Sindūra is red lead, a mineral vermilion, and a tilaka is the mark made with it on the forehead. The word añcita, from √añc, means made graceful or distinguished, so the name says she is set off by the mark rather than merely wearing it. Red powder on the forehead and in the parting of the hair signifies a married woman, and the name therefore quietly asserts her auspicious wifehood alongside everything else the hymn has claimed. It also points at the commonest way this text is actually used, since the recitation is very often performed as kumkumārcanā, with a pinch of red powder offered at each of the thousand names. Strictly, sindūra and kumkuma are not the same substance — the first is a mineral, the second is prepared from turmeric with lime, or from saffron — and the distinction has largely collapsed in modern practice.

With Umā the verse changes register. The name is old and its derivation is genuinely uncertain, which has not prevented the tradition from supplying one: that when Pārvatī undertook her austerities her mother tried to stop her with the cry u mā, O child, do not, and the words became her name. Kālidāsa uses the story, and it is worth knowing that such nirvacanas are interpretations offered by the tradition about itself rather than historical etymologies. Far older than the story is the appearance of Umā Haimavatī in the Kena Upaniṣad, where she materialises in the sky before a baffled Indra and explains to him the nature of the power the gods had failed to recognise. That is the earliest goddess-as-teacher in the Sanskrit canon, and its presence behind this name gives it more weight than a simple identification with Śiva's consort would carry.

Śailendratanayā names her father. Śaila is a mountain, indra in composition means chief, and the lord of mountains is Himavat, the Himālaya personified, whose daughter she is — the same descent that gives her the name Pārvatī, she of the mountain. The Purāṇic frame is that Satī, having died at Dakṣa's sacrifice, is reborn to Himavat and his wife Menā and wins Śiva a second time through austerity. Gaurī is from gaura, pale, whitish, and refers to her complexion. Purāṇic sources handle the pairing of Gaurī and the dark goddess in more than one way: the Devī Māhātmya has Kauśikī come forth from the sheath of Pārvatī's body, after which Pārvatī herself darkens and is called Kālikā, while other narratives run in the opposite direction, with Pārvatī shedding a dark skin through tapas and emerging fair. The tradition is not consistent here, and it is better to notice the inconsistency than to harmonise it.

Gandharvas are the musicians of the sky. In the Ṛgveda the Gandharva is a single figure who guards the soma; later the term names a whole class, companions of the apsarases, and their association with music becomes so complete that gāndharva is the technical designation for the ancient art music described in the Nāṭyaśāstra, and gandharvaveda the name for music as a branch of learning. The similarity between gandha, fragrance, and gandharva is almost certainly not a real etymological connection, but this verse places the two words at either end of it and no Sanskrit ear could have missed the echo.

The verse begins with the hardest onset in this part of the hymn. Tryakṣarī opens with three consonants — dental t, retroflex r, palatal y — before any vowel arrives, and then immediately gives kṣ. Take it slowly at first, releasing the t distinctly, letting the r be a single tap, and keeping the y as a glide rather than a vowel; the whole cluster occupies one syllable, and the name is three syllables, not four.

After that the verse becomes a systematic exercise in nasal-plus-stop clusters, and it is worth learning the single rule that governs all of them: the nasal always takes the position of the stop that follows it. Divyagandhāḍhyā has ndh, dental n before dental aspirated dh. Sindūra has nd, again dental. Añcita has ñc, the palatal nasal before the palatal c — a sound English writes as ny and never quite produces. Śailendra has ndr, dental n and d before r. The same rule explains the ṅ of klīṅkārī in the preceding verse and the ṇḍ of brahmāṇḍa two verses before that. Learn the rule once and a whole class of spellings stops being arbitrary.

The single most difficult conjunct here is ḍhy at the end of divyagandhāḍhyā: a retroflex ḍ with aspiration, followed by y, followed by long ā. The tongue has to be curled back for the ḍh and forward for the y in immediate succession, and the aspiration must be voiced — breath through the vocal cords, not the puff of an English d. The contrast with the dental aspirated dh earlier in the same word is the point of the exercise.

Both diphthongs of the second line are full long vowels: ai in śailendra and au in gaurī, each occupying the time of two short vowels. English speakers habitually clip them. Note also that gaurī and gandharva begin with the same voiced velar, and that the second line's texture is deliberately g-heavy after the second name has already given gandha.

For archanā the datives are tryakṣaryai, divyagandhāḍhyāyai, sindūratilakāñcitāyai, umāyai, śailendratanayāyai, gauryai and gandharvasevitāyai. Umāyai and gauryai are the two shortest utterances in this stretch of the nāmāvalī and the only two proper names in the verse; after the long compounds around them they tend to be rushed, and they should not be.

This is the verse that names the mechanics of its own recitation. Fragrance and vermilion are not only attributes she possesses but materials the worshipper handles, and the widespread practice of reciting the thousand names while offering a pinch of kumkuma at each one is described, in effect, by the third name. Anyone performing the recitation in that form arrives at sindūratilakāñcitā holding the substance the name is about.

What the verse asks beyond that is a particular kind of attention to the second line. Three of its four names are ordinary, humanly scaled ones: a woman with a name, a father and a complexion. They come immediately after a run of verses concerned with immeasurability, aloneness and the mothering of tens of millions of universes. The tradition does not treat this as a descent from the high theology to popular story; it treats the two as the same subject described at different distances, and the practical instruction at this point in the hymn is simply not to relax the attention when the vocabulary becomes familiar.