A digit of consciousness, and a hymn that names itself

Cit is the barest word for awareness the language has — not thought, not mind, not knowledge of anything, simply the fact of there being awareness at all. The hymn has reached for it twice before at moments when it wanted to say what she is rather than what she is like: at the fourth name, where she rises out of a fire-pit made of cit, and again where she is called cinmayī, made of it. Kalā, met earlier in this hymn as the arts and as the digits of the moon, has as its root sense a small division of something larger. Putting the two together produces a deliberate strain. Consciousness is exactly the sort of thing that cannot have parts; a sixteenth of it is not a smaller quantity of it. What the compound points at is the finest thing that is still awareness and not an object of awareness — and the moon is the right image, because a crescent is not a piece of the moon broken off but the whole of it seen at an angle.

Ānandakalikā keeps the sound and changes the figure. A kalikā is a bud, an unopened flower, and it is a near-homonym of kalā without being related to it. A bud is not an incomplete flower; it is a complete thing that has not happened yet. Set beside citkalā the pair says that what she is at her most inward is both very small and entirely unspent.

Preman, from √prī, to please or gladden, is the ordinary Sanskrit word for affection, used of parents and friends as readily as of lovers. The devotional theorists made it technical, distinguishing it from kāma by its direction: kāma wants something for the one who has it, preman for the one it is directed at. Nārada's aphorisms on devotion define bhakti itself as being of the nature of supreme preman. To make it her rūpa, her form, is to say that this is not a disposition she has but the material she consists of. Priyaṅkarī, which follows, is the practical version of the same thing — she who does what is pleasing — and the word carries a nice piece of sandhi, since priyam plus karī becomes priyaṅkarī, the final nasal taking the guttural form of the k it runs into.

The fifth name is the interesting one. Pārāyaṇa is pāra, the far shore, plus ayana, a going: a going to the other side. It is the standard Sanskrit word for reading a text right through from beginning to end, and the metaphor buried in it is a crossing of water. A Rāmāyaṇa pārāyaṇa or a week-long recitation of the Bhāgavata is the same word in use. Nāmapārāyaṇaprītā therefore does not say that she likes being praised. It says that the complete recitation of the thousand names, performed as a passage from one bank to the other, is a sufficient offering — and it says so inside the recitation itself, at name seven hundred and thirty-two, when the reciter is roughly three-quarters of the way across. The tradition surrounds the stotra with elaborate ritual apparatus, and this name quietly asserts that the reading alone will do.

Nandividyā returns to the transmission that occupied the three preceding verses. Nandin, or Nandikeśvara, is Śiva's foremost attendant and gatekeeper, the one whose leave is needed before anyone reaches Śiva at all. A vidyā, in this vocabulary, is specifically a goddess's mantra. The lists of teachers through whom her vidyā descends differ from handbook to handbook, and not all of them include Nandin; the commentators are not agreed about whether the Nandi-vidyā is one of the standard recensions of the fifteen-syllabled formula or a distinct mantra transmitted through him. The general sense is secure even where the detail is not: a form of her mantra bears his name.

Naṭeśvarī closes the verse and ties it back to Nandin by a route that is easy to miss. Naṭa, from the root that gives nṛtya, is a dancer or an actor, and Naṭeśvara is the lord of the dance, the figure the bronzes call Naṭarāja. She is his feminine counterpart, and also, in her own right, the presiding authority over performers. Nandin's connection with the performing arts is old: the manual of dance-gesture called the Abhinayadarpaṇa is attributed to a Nandikeśvara, and the tradition puts Nandin close to Śiva whenever the dance is being performed. This is the third position on dancing the hymn has taken within a hundred verses. Earlier she watched the tāṇḍava; in the next verse she will be said to love the lāsya; here she runs the company.

The metre is unusually tidy and will carry you if you notice it: eight, four, four in the first line, and eight, four, four again in the second. Citkalānandakalikā, premarūpā, priyaṅkarī; nāmapārāyaṇaprītā, nandividyā, naṭeśvarī. The two lines answer each other exactly, and each begins with its longest name.

The printed text marks the first join with two avagraha signs, which is a device some editions use to flag a swallowed long vowel. Nothing is pronounced there. Citkalā ends in a long ā, ānandakalikā begins with a long ā, and a long ā plus a long ā gives one long ā, held for the ordinary two beats and no more. The temptation is to make it three beats because the page has two marks on it.

The first word also completes a small collection the reciter has been assembling. The element cit ends in a dental t, and Sanskrit does three different things with it depending on what follows. Before a vowel it voices to d, giving cidagnikuṇḍa in the fourth name of the hymn. Before a nasal it becomes the matching nasal, giving cinmayī. Before an unvoiced stop it simply stays, giving citkalā. One consonant, three outcomes, all three now in the mouth.

Priyaṅkarī is the other sandhi worth pausing over, and it is audible. The name is priyam plus karī, and the final m, standing before a guttural k, is produced as the guttural nasal ṅ — the sound at the end of the English sing, made at the back with the tongue-body against the soft palate. Do not say priyam-karī with the lips closed; the lips never close.

Retroflex discipline is what the second line asks for. Pārāyaṇa has a retroflex ṇ, because the r earlier in the word has triggered the same rule that gave kulottīrṇā its ending in the verse before last. Naṭeśvarī has a retroflex ṭ, and it is the single most-mispronounced consonant in this name; the dental t of madhumatī two verses back is a good thing to say immediately before it as a contrast. Nandividyā, sitting between them, has nothing retroflex at all: two dental n sounds and the conjunct dy, dental d into the palatal glide, which is the same cluster as in vidyā wherever it appears.

Vowel lengths in nāmapārāyaṇaprītā need attention because four of the eight syllables are long and they are not evenly spaced: nā-ma-pā-rā-ya-ṇa-prī-tā. Long, short, long, long, short, short, long, long. Get that wrong and the quarter will not scan.

In archanā the datives run citkalāyai, ānandakalikāyai, premarūpāyai, priyaṅkaryai, nāmapārāyaṇaprītāyai, nandividyāyai, naṭeśvaryai. Note that the fourth and the last are ī-stems taking -yai while the rest take -āyai, and that saying priyaṅkaryai preserves the guttural nasal even though the word has changed shape.

What to hold while chanting: this is the verse in which the text notices you. If the thousand names are being read straight through, the fifth name arrives as a statement about what is happening at that moment in the room, and it is worth letting it land rather than passing over it at the speed of the surrounding epithets. The claim being made is a modest one and therefore easy to underrate — that the reading itself, without any further apparatus, is enough.