Treasury, army, empire, and the ocean at the border

Kauṭilya's Arthaśāstra analyses the state into seven constituent limbs — the sovereign, the minister, the countryside, the fortified capital, the treasury, the coercive force, and the ally — and the scheme was common property across the Sanskrit literature on statecraft. Two of the seven, kośa and bala, are named here in succession, with rājya and sāmrājya framing them. Whether or not the composer had a particular manual in mind, the vocabulary is technical rather than merely grand: it is what a court poet would use to praise an actual king. The hymn is not straining for metaphor. It is applying the ordinary language of sovereignty to the goddess and letting the application do the work.

Rājyalakṣmī, the fortune of kingship, names something Indian tradition treats as an independent power rather than a quality of the ruler. Śrī or Lakṣmī confers sovereignty by choosing to reside with a king, and — this is what gives the idea its edge — she may leave. The narrative literature is full of her migrations: she is churned out of the ocean of milk, she attends the demon Bali during his ascendancy and departs when he is dispossessed, and a kingdom's decline is described as her withdrawal. To call her rājyalakṣmī is therefore to name the volatile element in political power, the thing no amount of administration can secure. That she is churned from the sea also makes a quiet frame for the verse, which ends on the ocean.

Kośa is a word of unusual range. Its base sense is a container — a chest, a cask, a scabbard, the calyx of a flower — and from there the state treasury, and also a lexicon, which is why the standard Sanskrit thesaurus is the Amarakośa, a treasure-chest of words. Vedānta gives it a further use. The Taittirīya Upaniṣad's second section describes the self as wrapped in a series of sheaths, from the one made of food outward through breath, mind and understanding to the one made of bliss, and the later tradition calls these the five kośas. A reader who takes kośanāthā only as mistress of the treasury has the plain sense right; one who hears the Vedāntic term as well has her presiding over the five envelopes in which a human being is packed. Both are traditional, and this hymn is normally happy to intend both.

Caturaṅgabala is the standard designation of a complete army: four aṅgas or limbs, being elephants, chariots, cavalry and infantry. The phrase has an afterlife most readers will recognise without knowing it: the board game caturaṅga, named for those four arms, travelled west through Persian shatranj and became chess. Her forces in the surrounding narrative are described in exactly these terms; caturaṅgabaleśvarī certifies that the army is complete and that she, not Daṇḍanāthā, commands it.

Sāmrājya is a stronger word than rājya, and the strength is old. Vedic ritual literature distinguishes grades of rulership, associating different consecration rites with different titles, and the accounts of the great anointing preserve a graded list of paramount conditions — sāmrājya, bhaujya, svārājya and others — with imperial paramountcy at its head. Commentators on this hymn take a standing interest in svārājya, self-rule, reading the gift of empire as sovereignty over oneself. The reading is legitimate, but the hymn itself says sāmrājya, and the tradition has never much wanted to choose.

Satyasandhā is the hinge. Sandhā, from sam plus √dhā, to put together, is a compact, something laid down between parties; satyasandha, one whose engagements hold, is a standing epithet of Rāma in the Rāmāyaṇa. Applied here, after four names promising treasure, force and empire, it converts the promises into obligations. The Śākta tradition has a specific pledge in view: at the close of the Devī Māhātmya the goddess undertakes to become manifest again whenever the world is oppressed by demonic power, and the cult of her repeated advent rests on it. Satyasandhā says that it is not rhetoric.

Sāgaramekhalā, she whose girdle is the ocean, is a poetic commonplace redirected. The earth is regularly called ocean-girdled, and a cakravartin's domain conventionally has no border but water. Attached to her, the epithet does two things at once. It completes the political series, since ocean-to-ocean is the largest kingdom there is, and it dissolves it, since a person wearing the sea as a belt is not a ruler of the earth but the earth itself. The verse has been listing what she commands, and it ends by relocating all of it inside her.

The verse divides evenly and unusually: four syllables, four, eight in the first line; six, four, six in the second. The two eight-syllable names sit at the ends of their lines, which gives the whole verse a rocking motion, short units gathering into a long one. Where the previous verse hammered on rāj, this one begins with rājyalakṣmīḥ and then abandons the pattern for a run of s: sāmrājyadāyinī, satyasandhā, sāgaramekhalā.

Rājyalakṣmīḥ contains the conjunct kṣm, which frightens people unnecessarily. Kṣ is a single unit in practice, made at the back of the mouth and released as a sibilant, and the m follows it directly; lakṣmī is two syllables, lak-ṣmī, not three. The name also ends in a visarga, and this is a small grammatical curiosity worth knowing: most feminine stems in long ī, like devī and nadī, have no ending in the nominative singular, but lakṣmī takes one, which is why the hymn reads lakṣmīḥ rather than lakṣmī.

Caturaṅgabaleśvarī has the nasal ṅ before g, which is the sound English has at the end of sing, and it must be that nasal and not the dental n. The name also hides a sandhi: bala ends in short a, īśvarī begins in long ī, and a plus ī yields e, so baleśvarī is bala plus īśvarī. Seeing that keeps the word from having to be memorised as an undifferentiated string, and the same join reappears throughout the hymn.

In satyasandhā the cluster ndh is a dental n followed by an aspirated dental dh, and the aspiration must be heard. In sāgaramekhalā there is nothing difficult, which makes it the natural place to let the line settle; it is the last name of the verse and the metre gives it room.

Chanted as archanā with each name in the dative followed by namaḥ, the verse once again mixes stem classes and once again punishes the assumption that everything ends in -āyai. The ā-stems give kośanāthāyai, satyasandhāyai, sāgaramekhalāyai. The ī-stems contract: rājyalakṣmyai, caturaṅgabaleśvaryai, sāmrājyadāyinyai. Three and three, alternating irregularly, so this verse is worth rehearsing slowly in the nāmāvalī form before it is taken at speed.

The difficulty this verse presents is not phonetic but dispositional. It is a list of very large worldly goods, and it is being chanted, in most cases, by someone who will not receive an empire. Two responses to that have long coexisted in the tradition, and neither requires embarrassment. The first is to take the names as they stand and understand that the hymn was composed in and for a world where kingdoms were real objects of petition and the goddess was a state deity. The other is to follow the commentators to svārājya and hear the treasury as the sheaths of the self and the empire as self-possession. What the verse itself supplies, in the fifth name, is the reason either reading can be trusted: what she has undertaken she performs. And what the sixth supplies is the correction against grasping, since once the earth turns out to be her body there is nothing left that could be received from outside.