The great eater who would not take a leaf

Maheśvarī is the feminine of Maheśvara, the great lord, one of the standard names of Śiva, and at its simplest the name says that whatever sovereignty is his is equally hers. But the word carries a second and more specific weight. Māheśvarī is one of the Seven Mothers, the saptamātṛkā, the group of goddesses who emerge from the male gods as their powers and fight alongside the Devī — Brāhmī from Brahmā, Vaiṣṇavī from Viṣṇu, Kaumārī from Skanda, Māheśvarī from Śiva, and so on down to Cāmuṇḍā. It is worth noticing before going further that this single verse names two members of that group, since the last name here is the deed from which Cāmuṇḍā got her name.

Mahākālī is the feminine of Mahākāla, and the word kāla means both black and time. Sanskrit keeps the two senses close enough that the tradition treats them as one: what is dark is what devours, and what devours is time. Mahākāla is Śiva at Ujjain, lord of the cremation ground and of the hour; Mahākālī is the corresponding feminine. In the standard ritual framing of the Devī Māhātmya, the three long episodes of that text are assigned to three forms of the goddess, with Mahākālī presiding over the first, in which Viṣṇu wakes from his sleep on the cosmic waters and kills Madhu and Kaiṭabha. So the name is not simply an alternative for Kālī. It carries an entire third of the Devī Māhātmya behind it.

The two eating names that follow are both bahuvrīhis, compounds that describe by possession: she whose morsel is huge, she whose feeding is vast. The pair is not redundant, and the words themselves suggest the distinction. Grāsa is a mouthful, a single bolus, the amount taken in at one time — and in the astronomical literature it is the technical term for the portion of the sun or moon swallowed during an eclipse, a usage that shares its root with grahaṇa, the eclipse itself. Aśana is eating as an activity rather than a quantity. Read together, one name gives the single swallow at the dissolution of a world-age and the other gives the continuous consumption that is going on all the time. The tantric philosophers of Kashmir made technical use of the same vocabulary, describing the way consciousness assimilates its objects as a kind of devouring, and their tradition knows a goddess whose title means the withdrawer of time; the sahasranāma is not that technical, but it is drawing on the same instinct that the highest power is best described as an appetite.

Aparṇā turns the verse over. When Pārvatī undertook the austerities by which she would win Śiva, she withdrew from food by stages, and Kālidāsa tells the story in the fifth canto of the Kumārasaṃbhava: she lived on what fell of its own accord, then gave up even the fallen leaves, and from that the sages called her Aparṇā, leafless. It is one of two names in her biography that come from something said about her rather than about a quality she has, the other being Umā, which the same poem derives from her mother's cry of "u mā" — oh, do not — when she saw what the girl was doing to herself. Ascetic practice in India was in fact classified by diet, with those living on fruit, on leaves, on water and on air ranked in order, and Aparṇā names the step past the leaf-eaters. Placed immediately after mahāśanā, the name produces the sharpest juxtaposition in this stretch of the hymn. The two are the same grammatical form, both describing her by reference to food, and they say opposite things. Neither cancels the other.

Caṇḍikā comes from caṇḍa, hot, violent, passionate, and it is the name the Devī Māhātmya itself uses for the goddess more often than any other. The final name recalls chapter seven of that text. Śumbha and Niśumbha send two demon captains, Caṇḍa and Muṇḍa, to seize Ambikā; her face goes black with anger and Kālī springs out of her forehead; Kālī hunts them down and brings back their heads, and Ambikā tells her that because she has come carrying Caṇḍa and Muṇḍa she will be known in the world as Cāmuṇḍā. The sahasranāma assigns the deed to its one subject, so that the goddess who was split into an angry face and the black figure that leapt from it is here a single person — the same person, three names earlier, called Mahākālī.

The two lines have completely different rhythms and are best drilled apart. The first is four names of four syllables each, a flat drumbeat: maheśvarī, mahākālī, mahāgrāsā, mahāśanā. The second is short, short, very long: aparṇā and caṇḍikā at three syllables apiece, then a ten-syllable name that runs to the end of the verse. Reciters who have found a groove in the first line tend to carry it into the second and stumble at the third name.

The first name conceals a join. It is mahā plus īśvarī, and a final ā meeting an initial ī yields e, so the two words fuse into maheśvarī. This is why the first of the four mahā- names does not look like the other three, where mahā simply sits in front of the following word unchanged. Knowing the sandhi keeps a reciter from hearing the name as mahe-śvarī, some word beginning with śvarī, and it also explains the same e in dozens of other names across the hymn.

Within the first line the danger is mahāgrāsā and mahāśanā, adjacent, similar in shape, both ending in the same two syllables. Fix them by sense — the mouthful, then the eating — rather than by sound. The gr of grāsā is a single onset with the r fully pronounced; the ś of mahāśanā is the palatal sibilant, made with the tongue against the hard palate, not the retroflex ṣ that will appear later in the verse.

Aparṇā and the long final name are a small course in retroflexion. In aparṇā the n has become ṇ because of the r immediately before it, which is a regular feature of Sanskrit word-formation and not an irregularity to be memorized. In caṇḍamuṇḍāsuraniṣūdinī there are two retroflex nasals before stops, ṇḍ and ṇḍ, and then the ṣ of niṣūdinī, which is retroflex because the vowel i of the prefix ni precedes it — the underlying verb is sūdana, with a dental s. Say caṇ-ḍa muṇ-ḍā with the tongue curled back for the whole cluster, and give ṣū its full length.

For archanā, the verse is a useful drill in the two feminine datives. Maheśvarī, mahākālī and caṇḍamuṇḍāsuraniṣūdinī are ī-stems and give maheśvaryai namaḥ, mahākālyai namaḥ, caṇḍamuṇḍāsuraniṣūdinyai namaḥ, with the ī shortening to y before the ending. The remaining four are ā-stems and give the familiar -āyai: mahāgrāsāyai, mahāśanāyai, aparṇāyai, caṇḍikāyai. Alternating between the two endings within a single verse is exactly the exercise most reciters need.

As for what the verse asks: it asks the person chanting to hold together an appetite that consumes everything and a fast so complete it refuses a leaf, and to name them as one woman without resolving the contradiction. That is harder than it sounds, and the instinct to make the fierce names figurative and the ascetic name literal should be resisted. It is also worth registering where this verse falls. It comes immediately after a long passage in which she removes disease, misfortune and death, and it turns out that the power that does the removing is the same one that eats the world at the end of an age and once brought back two severed heads.