Moonlight, monsoon, thunderbolt, axe

Abdhi, in the first name, is a small piece of poetic etymology worth unpacking: ap, water, plus dhi from the root dhā, to hold, so the ocean is the water-holder. Onto it the poet sets candrikā, moonlight, and behind the pairing lies a convention that Sanskrit poets treat as a fact of nature — the sea rises when the moon appears, swelling at the sight of it as a lover does. Purāṇic myth tightens the knot, since the moon was one of the treasures that came up when gods and demons churned the ocean of milk: the light that lifts the tide is the ocean's own child. Set this name beside the last name of the previous verse and the two form a pair, the sun against the darkness of age and now the moon over the water of fortune. Bhāgya itself picks up the thread as well. Where the earlier verse gave daurbhāgya, bad allotment, this one gives bhāgya outright, a whole sea of it.

The moon has a further and more technical life in this tradition. Śrīvidyā counts fifteen nityā goddesses, one for each lunar day of the waxing fortnight, and reckons Lalitā herself as the sixteenth digit, the kalā that never wanes and is therefore never subject to the fortnightly loss. Candrikā is the ordinary word for moonlight, and the verse is not making a technical claim; but a reciter who knows the nityā scheme will hear the name differently, as light from the digit that does not diminish falling on a fortune that consequently does not ebb.

The second name is built on two pieces of vocabulary that reward attention. Kekin is the peacock, and the word is derived from kekā, the technical term in Sanskrit poetics for the peacock's cry — the language has a separate noun for the sound each creature makes, and this bird is named simply after its noise. Ghanāghana is rarer: an intensive reduplication of ghana, which means compact or dense and, as a noun, a cloud. The doubled form names the heaviest kind of raincloud, the black wall of the monsoon's arrival, and the dictionaries record it also as an epithet of Indra and of an elephant in rut. Poets had a standing choice of birds for this scene. The cātaka is the usual one, said to drink nothing but falling raindrops and therefore to wait with its beak open through the hot months. The peacock is the other, and the peacock is chosen here because its response to the cloud is not thirst but display: it screams and it dances. The devotee's mind is being cast as the creature that answers the approach of the rain with an uncontrolled performance, having done nothing to summon it.

With dambholi, Indra's thunderbolt, the verse steps into Vedic mythology proper. The vajra is the weapon with which Indra split Vṛtra, the serpent who lay across the mountain holding back the waters, so that the rivers ran free — the central act of the Ṛgveda's Indra hymns, and the reason the cloud in the preceding name and the bolt in this one belong to a single complex rather than to two. Later mythology adds that the weapon was fashioned from the bones of the sage Dadhīci, who gave up his body when the gods needed something hard enough to kill Vṛtra with. The specific application to mountains has its own story: the mountains once had wings and flew, until Indra cut the wings off with the vajra to hold them still, and Maināka alone escaped by hiding in the sea, a tale Maināka himself tells Hanumān in the Rāmāyaṇa when he rises out of the water to offer him rest. Disease piled up like a mountain is therefore not simply broken, it is grounded.

The last name deflates its own object, as the cotton and the gale did in the previous verse. Kuṭhārikā is a diminutive: not the great axe but the hatchet, the household tool. Death is dāru, sawn timber. That the founder-figure of one strand of this tradition is Paraśurāma, the axe-bearing brahmin to whom the Paraśurāmakalpasūtra is attributed, gives the image a resonance in Śrīvidyā circles; the name itself makes no such claim, and I would not press it further than a resonance.

The two lines behave completely differently and need to be learned separately. In the first line the names are uneven — six syllables for bhāgyābdhicandrikā and ten for bhaktacittakekighanāghanā — so the caesura at the eighth syllable falls inside the second name, two syllables after it begins. Do not breathe there. The whole of the first line has to be carried on one breath, or the second name will be split after bhakta into something that means nothing.

The second line is the opposite: two names of eight syllables each, dividing exactly at the caesura. What hides the division is sandhi. Rogaparvatadambholiḥ ends in a visarga, and a visarga preceded by i and followed by a voiced sound becomes r, so the printed text runs dambholir mṛtyudārukuṭhārikā and looks like one enormous compound. It is two names, and the r that appears to join them belongs to the first. Knowing that is the difference between reciting the line and reciting a sound.

Ghanāghanā is the hardest thing in the verse to say cleanly. Both gha syllables are voiced aspirated velars, one sound each and not g followed by h, and under speed they collapse into ga-na-ga-na, which loses both the word and the thunder the reduplication is imitating. Slow the second half of that name down until each gha has audible breath in it. Elsewhere: ābdhi has b and dh together, both voiced, the second aspirated; dambholi has the labial nasal followed by aspirated bh; kuṭhārikā has ṭh, a retroflex stop with breath after it, nothing like the th of English "thin"; and mṛtyu opens with the short syllabic ṛ, the same vowel that caused trouble in vṛṣṭiḥ in the previous verse.

The archanā forms hold a genuine oddity. Three of the four are regular feminine datives — bhāgyābdhicandrikāyai namaḥ, bhaktacittakekighanāghanāyai namaḥ, mṛtyudārukuṭhārikāyai namaḥ. The third is not. Dambholi is a masculine noun standing in apposition to the goddess, and the namāvalī as printed here keeps its masculine dative: rogaparvatadambholaye namaḥ, with the ending -aye rather than -yai. Usage varies on this point between printed namāvalīs, and reciters who have been producing -āyai automatically for four hundred names will need to slow down and think. It is one of the small places where the hymn declines to be regular.

What the verse asks is set by its middle name. The peacock does not fetch the monsoon and cannot. It has a relationship to the rain that is entirely one of response — it hears the thunder, it cries, it opens the tail — and the poet has put the devotee's mind in exactly that position. Nothing in the verse suggests that recitation causes the thunderbolt to fall on the mountain of disease. What it offers instead is the description of a temperament: a mind that recognizes the change in the air. Chanted at a sickbed, which is where this verse tends to be chanted, that is a more sober promise than it first appears, and a more durable one.