A sovereign who delegates, and a sovereignty no quality can touch

Mārtāṇḍa is one of the sun's older names and one of the strangest, since it means something like born of the dead egg, from mṛta and aṇḍa. The Ṛgveda tells the story in its tenth book: Aditi bore eight sons, took seven of them to the gods, and threw the eighth away — the lifeless lump, the miscarriage — and then brought Mārtāṇḍa back, the hymn says, for birth and for death. The sun in this account is the child that was discarded and readmitted, and the readmission is what installs mortality in the world along with generation. It is a bleak little myth, and it sits under a name that later usage treats as simply meaning "the sun", the way most people use words whose histories they have stopped hearing.

Mārtāṇḍa-Bhairava is the solar Bhairava, and in this tradition he is a specific worshipping deity rather than a general epithet. The commentators generally take the name as referring to a rite in which Bhairava in solar form is her consort and her devotee at once, and there is a related current of Śrīvidyā practice in which the sun is worshipped as the outer face of the same reality the Śrīcakra holds at its centre. Readers in western India will also know Mārtāṇḍa Bhairava as the name of a widely worshipped regional deity, the god of Jejuri usually called Khaṇḍobā, who is understood as a form of Śiva; that cult is not what the sahasranāma is discussing, but the shared name is a reminder that the solar Bhairava had a life outside the tantric handbooks. What the hymn is doing with the name is what it did eight names ago with vīrārādhyā and does repeatedly elsewhere: it establishes her rank by naming her worshippers, and the worshippers it selects are never small.

Mantriṇī is the feminine of mantrin, a king's counsellor — the word for a minister of state, built on mantra in its old sense of counsel or deliberation rather than sacred formula. In the long narrative of Lalitā embedded in the Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa, the Lalitopākhyāna, the goddess assembles an army against the demon Bhaṇḍa, and two figures stand at the head of it: Mantriṇī, also called Śyāmalā and identified with Mātaṅgī, who holds the office of prime minister, and Daṇḍanāthā, identified with Vārāhī, who commands the forces. Each has her own war-chariot, the Geyacakra and the Kiricakra, and the sahasranāma has already named both of them in its earlier description of the campaign. Dhur, the second element of the compound, is the yoke-pole of a cart, so rājyadhur is the load a draught animal pulls and the metaphor is agricultural before it is political. The doctrinal point the name makes is that she does not pull it. Sanskrit political theory has a good deal to say about kings who cannot delegate, and Sāṃkhya has a great deal to say about a puruṣa who does nothing while prakṛti performs every action there is; the name sits comfortably in either frame, and the tradition has read it in both.

Tripurā is arguably the oldest name this goddess has in this tradition, and Tripureśī is its regent form. Two families of meaning run through it. The first is narrative: Tripura is the triple city of the demons, built of gold, silver and iron, which Śiva destroyed with a single arrow, and this school insists that he could do it only by her power, so that the mistress of the triple city is both the one who owned it and the one who brought it down. The second is analytic, and it is the one the ritual texts use: three is the number that organises everything in this system. The three guṇas, the three states of waking, dream and dreamless sleep, the three bodies, the three bindus that generate the Śrīcakra, and above all the three segments of the fifteen-syllabled mantra. Tripureśī is the name in which those two families meet, and the Tripurā Upaniṣad, a short late text of this school, is essentially an extended argument that they are one thing.

Jayatsenā returns to the war for one word. The present participle jayat, conquering, is grammatically active and continuous — an army that is winning, not one that won — and the tradition reads the senā either as the literal host of the Lalitopākhyāna or as the ranks of goddesses resident in the enclosures of the Śrīcakra, who are the same army in another notation.

Nistraiguṇyā takes up what the preceding verse began. There, virajāḥ said that one of the three strands of nature, the restless one, does not settle on her; here the claim is generalised to all three at once. Traiguṇya is an abstract noun formed on triguṇa — not the three qualities but the condition of being constituted by them, which is the condition of every object in the Sāṃkhya universe without exception. To be nistraiguṇya is therefore to be outside the whole of manifest nature. The word is famous from the Bhagavad Gītā, where it appears as an instruction: be free of the three. Here it is a description. That she is elsewhere in this same hymn called by names that credit her with the guṇas is not an inconsistency the tradition tries to hide; the standard reading is that she wields them without being made of them.

Parāparā closes the verse with a compound that can be parsed two ways and is meant to be. As a dvandva it is the higher and the lower, both at once. But parā and aparā are also a fixed technical pair. The Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad divides all knowledge into the higher and the lower and puts the entire Veda, grammar, metre and astronomy on the lower side; the Trika schools of Kashmir make Parā, Parāparā and Aparā three goddesses, with Parāparā as the middle one who holds unity and difference together without letting either dissolve. Whichever reading is taken, the name performs the same office at the end of the verse that it does in those systems: it refuses to let the transcendence just asserted in nistraiguṇyā turn into absence.

This verse contains the longest single name in the immediate neighbourhood and two of the most consonant-heavy, and the difficulty in it is almost entirely mechanical. The first line has only two names and both fill a half-line exactly, eight syllables each, which means there is no internal breathing space at all until the caesura. Take the breath before beginning.

Mārtāṇḍabhairavārādhyā turns on the cluster ṇḍ, which is two retroflexes in succession: the tongue-tip goes back to the roof of the mouth for the nasal and stays there for the ḍ. Speakers of English will want to substitute the dental nd of "and", and the substitution is audible. The bh of bhairava is a single aspirated labial, not b followed by h, and ai is a full long diphthong. The long ā of -vārādhyā is the join between bhairava and ārādhyā, short a plus long ā yielding a single long ā, the same sandhi that operates in dozens of names in this hymn.

Mantriṇīnyastarājyadhūḥ needs to be broken into its parts before it can be said at speed: mantriṇī, nyasta, rājya, dhūḥ. The ntr in mantriṇī is dental n, dental t and r in immediate succession; the ṇ of the following syllable is retroflex, pulled back by the r before it. Then ny, a dental n with a palatal y, and jy in rājya, a palatal j with the same y. The name ends in a visarga after a long ū, which in careful recitation gets a light echo of the preceding vowel — dhūḥu — rather than being clipped off.

That ending matters for anyone using these names in individual salutation, because dhur is a consonant stem and the dative is dhure. The form is mantriṇīnyastarājyadhure namaḥ. Like virajase in the verse before it, this is a place where the ubiquitous -āyai ending does not apply, and two such names within eight of each other is a fair warning that the ending should be learned per name rather than assumed.

Nistraiguṇyā has the most crowded syllable in the verse: strai, which is s, t, r and the diphthong ai, all of them sounded, with nothing swallowed. Say it slowly a few times against the simpler tri of tripureśī and the difference between the two clusters becomes obvious. The ṇy at the end is again retroflex nasal plus palatal glide.

Parāparā is the relief at the end of the line, four open syllables alternating short and long, and it should be allowed to sound like relief. Its shape is also a small mnemonic: the same two syllables twice, para and para, differing only in that the second was apara before sandhi swallowed its initial vowel.

What the verse asks of the reciter is a particular kind of attention to rank. Everything in the first line is somebody else doing something — a god performing worship, a minister carrying a government — and the person chanting is being placed in that same court, at a considerable distance from the throne, among figures who are themselves enormous. The second line then removes the throne room altogether. It is worth letting the two halves stay in tension rather than resolving them, because the tension is the verse's actual content: a sovereign who is entirely served and entirely unencumbered.