Five names on one syllable: the goddess as sovereign

Sanskrit lets this verse work because two families of words have grown from one root. The verb √rāj means to shine, to be radiant, and also to rule, to be eminent; rājan, king, is a formation from it, and so is rājat, the present participle used in the fourth name. To an English ear the alliteration of these five names looks decorative. In Sanskrit it is closer to an argument, since the same root produces both the throne and the light. The pivot at rājatkṛpā is only visible if you know this: after three names built on the noun, the fourth is built on the verb, and a reader who hears only the repeated sound will walk past the joint.

Rājarājeśvarī is not merely one name among the thousand. It is the standing name of the goddess in the Śrīvidyā tradition, the form under which she is installed in temples and addressed in daily practice, and for many practitioners it functions as her proper name in the way Lalitā or Tripurasundarī does. The compound resolves as the īśvarī, sovereign lady, of the rājarāja, the king of kings. Rājarāja by itself is an old epithet of Kubera, the lord of wealth and treasurer of the gods, and it was also a favourite regnal title among South Indian dynasties, most famously the Cholas. The hymn does not tell us which sovereign it has in mind, and the interpretation that matters to the tradition is the one that reads rājarāja as Śiva in his aspect as supreme ruler: whoever the king of kings turns out to be, there is somebody above him, and she is a woman.

The royal register is not an occasional flourish in this literature but its governing metaphor. The Lalitopākhyāna, the Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa narrative in which the sahasranāma is embedded, houses her in Śrīpura, a city of concentric enclosing walls made of successively more precious substances, with the palace at the centre. She has a minister, Mantriṇī, and a commander of forces, Daṇḍanāthā; she holds court; she goes to war with a general staff. The Śrīcakra is that city seen from above, its nine enclosures the walls and its central point the throne room. When the hymn calls her rājarājeśvarī it is invoking a whole imagined polity, and the surrounding vocabulary of kingdom, treasury, army and empire belongs to the same picture.

Rājyadāyinī, the giver of kingdoms, states plainly what much devotional literature prefers to leave implied. Śrīvidyā has never pretended that its rites are concerned only with liberation, and the old classification of ritual into what is performed as obligation and what is performed for a desired result puts sovereignty at the head of the second list. This is social history rather than theory: the tradition was carried in South India by monastic and temple establishments that depended on royal patronage, and a goddess who gives kingdoms was of direct interest to the people who endowed her worship. Commentarial readings that take rājya as self-rule are genuine and old, but they are a second reading laid over a first that the text does not disown. Rājyavallabhā, the beloved of the realm, keeps both senses in play, since vallabha is used both for a cherished spouse and for a king's favourite officer.

The fourth name is the one the verse is built around. Rājatkṛpā, she whose compassion is resplendent, uses kṛpā — pity, tenderness, the quality of being moved by another's condition — and makes it the thing about her that is visibly luminous. The compound is a bahuvrīhi: she is not compassion, she is the one whose compassion shines. Radiance is the ordinary Sanskrit sign of royalty, the visible glory that marks a ruler out; here the glory that marks her out is mercy.

The last name is one of the longest in the hymn and unpacks into three pieces: rājapīṭha, the royal seat; niveśita, caused to be seated, installed; and nijāśrita, her own refugees, those who have taken shelter with her. She is the one by whom her own dependents have been installed on royal thrones. Pīṭha carries a second charge here: the pīṭhas are the seats of the goddess, the sacred sites of her presence, and the pīṭha is also the base of a ritual diagram or an image. Āśrita belongs to the śaraṇa vocabulary of refuge that runs through the whole devotional tradition. The compound inverts the usual relation. Taking refuge normally means accepting dependence. Here the dependent is enthroned, and the concluding position of the name in a five-name run about kingship makes the point unmistakable: her sovereignty is exercised by distributing itself.

Five names beginning with the same syllable is a gift to the memory and a trap for the tongue. Reciters who know the verse well can still lose their place inside it, because the ear has nothing to hold on to but rāj repeated. The remedy is to fix the sequence by its structure rather than its sound: a name about her rank, one about what she gives, one about how the realm regards her, then the pivot at compassion, then the long name that fills the rest of the verse. Counting also helps, since the metre is strict. The first line is six syllables, then five, then five; the second is four, then twelve.

The conjunct jya in rājyadāyinī and rājyavallabhā is a palatal j followed by the palatal glide y, both made in the same place in the mouth, and it should be a single smooth articulation rather than j-plus-ya. In rājyavallabhā the doubled ll is genuinely doubled and must be held: val-la-bhā, with the tongue staying at the teeth across the join. Shortening it is the commonest error in the verse.

Rājatkṛpā packs three difficulties into four syllables. The t at the end of rājat is a dental stop with no vowel after it, and it runs straight into the k of kṛpā, giving the cluster tkṛ; then comes the vocalic ṛ, a syllable in its own right and not the sequence r plus i. Say rā-jat-kṛ-pā slowly until the t is audible without becoming a separate syllable.

The long final name is best learned in three pieces and then joined. Rājapīṭha has a retroflex aspirated ṭh, made with the tongue-tip well back and a genuine puff of breath, which English speakers flatten into an ordinary t. Nijāśritā contains a sandhi worth seeing: the elements are nija, one's own, and āśrita, one who has taken refuge; nija ends in short a, āśrita begins in long ā, and the two merge into the single long ā you hear in nijā-. The śri cluster that follows is a palatal ś closing onto r. Assembled: rāja-pīṭha-niveśita-nijāśritā, twelve syllables in one breath.

For recitation as archanā, where each name is put in the dative and followed by namaḥ, this verse again mixes stem types. The ā-stems behave as expected: rājyavallabhāyai, rājatkṛpāyai, rājapīṭhaniveśitanijāśritāyai. But the first two names are ī-stems, and the long ī contracts to y before the ending: rājarājeśvaryai and rājyadāyinyai, not the -āyai a beginner will reach for.

What the verse asks of the person chanting it is a decision about how to hear its politics. It can be recited as a petition, and it has been, by people who wanted the things it names. It can also be recited as a description of an order in which the last name is the operative one, so that the kingdoms given and the thrones distributed are not prizes to be requested but a statement about the direction in which her sovereignty runs. The fourth name arbitrates. Once you have noticed that the shine in rājatkṛpā is the shine of pity, the four names around it read differently, and the run of royal vocabulary stops sounding like an inventory of what she can hand out.