Two treasuries of savour, and then five names beginning in p

Nidhi is a buried hoard — the word used for the legendary treasures of Kubera, and for anything laid down and kept. Kalānidhi, treasury of digits, is also one of the ordinary poetic names for the moon in classical Sanskrit, since the moon is where the sixteen kalās are stored and paid out one a night. The name therefore arrives with a second meaning already attached, and it does so directly after the previous verse called her kalāmālā, a garland of the same digits. Grammatically it is worth noticing that nidhi is a masculine noun and stays masculine here, standing in apposition to her rather than being feminised. The consequence shows up in the litany of individual salutations, where the form is kalānidhaye namaḥ.

Kāvya is what a poet makes, and kalā in this compound has slid from its lunar and fractional senses over to its other career as art or practised skill — one of the sixty-four accomplishments a cultivated person was expected to have. To call her the art of poetry is a stronger claim than calling her its patron. Sarasvatī is the goddess who grants poetry; this name says that the craft itself, the thing that happens when words are made to carry more than they state, is her. The Śrīvidyā tradition has a long attachment to this idea and a founding anecdote for it in the Saundaryalaharī, where a child is given her breast to drink and grows up to outdo the accomplished poets — a story attached in different regions to different figures, which is a good sign that what mattered was the claim rather than the biography.

Rasa has already been discussed in the previous verse under sāmarasya, and the two names here take it in its two most developed technical directions. Rasajñā, one who knows rasa, is in ordinary Sanskrit also a noun for the tongue, the organ that knows taste; the name thus sits on the boundary between the physical and the aesthetic senses of the word without choosing. Behind the aesthetic sense stands Bharata's Nāṭyaśāstra and its famous formula that rasa arises from the conjunction of the determinants, the consequents and the transitory states — a sentence so compressed that the entire subsequent history of Sanskrit literary theory can be read as a quarrel about how to construe it. The quarrel matters here because its central question is whether rasa is in the work, in the actor or in the audience, and rasajñā answers by locating the knowing in her.

Śevadhi, the second word for treasure, is the older and rarer of the two; it belongs to the Vedic layer of the language and carries the sense of a store that is not depleted by being drawn on. Rasaśevadhiḥ therefore does not simply repeat kalānidhiḥ at the other end of the line. It says that savour is the sort of thing that can be given away indefinitely, which is the standard position of the aestheticians about rasa and the standard position of the theologians about her.

The second line changes register completely. Puṣṭā, from √puṣ, means nourished, thriving, filled out — the word used of well-fed cattle and healthy crops. It belongs to the oldest stratum of Indian goddess vocabulary, the language of the Śrī Sūkta, where prosperity is described in agricultural terms and requested in the same breath as beauty. Purātanā is formed from purā, in former times, with the suffix that also gives sanātana, everlasting: not merely old but belonging to the time before. Pūjyā is a gerundive from √pūj, to honour, and it joins a small series of such forms running through this hymn — ārādhyā appeared in the verse three back and again in the verse two back, each time with a named worshipper attached. Here there is no worshipper named, and the effect of the bare gerundive is to generalise: not worshipped by heroes or by a particular Bhairava, simply to be worshipped.

Puṣkara is a word of very wide range. It is the blue lotus, and it is also water, a pond, the sky, the bell of a drum and the tip of an elephant's trunk; it is the name of a famous lake and pilgrimage town in Rajasthan. In the Śrī Sūkta the goddess is called puṣkariṇī, lotus-bearing or pond-like, in the same verse in which she is called puṣṭi, nourishment — the two words of this line standing side by side in a hymn a great deal older than this one. Puṣkarekṣaṇā, the last name, is a straightforward bahuvrīhi with the join of a and ī producing e: she whose eyes are lotuses. Lotus-eyed is among the most worn epithets in Sanskrit, applied to almost every deity and most heroes, and its placement here is what redeems it. Four names have just described a faculty of discrimination so refined that it has taste itself in storage. The verse closes by turning that faculty into a pair of eyes and looking back.

The alliterative organisation noted in the previous verse continues here and is now unmistakable. The first line pairs two k-names with two r-names; the second line gives five names in succession all beginning with p, which is the same organising principle that governed the second line of the verse four back. Over these several verses the composer is working with two shapes only — half-lines filled by one or two long compounds, and half-lines packed with short names bound by a shared initial — and the practical value of noticing this is that it converts a formless list into something with a rhythm you can anticipate.

The first line has three visarga-final and jñā-containing hazards. Kalānidhiḥ and rasaśevadhiḥ both end in -dhiḥ: an aspirated dental dh, a short i, then the visarga, which in careful recitation carries a faint echo of the preceding vowel. Do not let the aspiration of dh collapse into a plain d, and do not let the short i lengthen. Rasajñā has the jña cluster, whose regional pronunciations differ legitimately — gya, dnya or jña with both consonants sounded — and the only wrong answer is a bare j. Kāvyakalā has vy, a labiodental v with a palatal y following immediately.

Both -dhi names are i-stem nouns, and neither takes the -āyai ending. For individual salutation they are kalānidhaye namaḥ and rasaśevadhaye namaḥ. This is now the fourth verse running in which at least one name declines against the pattern the ear has learned, and the lesson is worth stating plainly: in this stretch of the hymn the dative should be checked and not guessed.

The second line is a pronunciation drill disguised as a list. Puṣṭā, puṣkarā and puṣkarekṣaṇā all contain ṣ, the retroflex sibilant, which is made with the tongue-tip curled back and is distinct both from the dental s of purātanā and from the palatal ś. In puṣṭā the ṣ is followed by a retroflex ṭ, so the tongue is already in position and simply stops; in puṣkarā it is followed by a guttural k, which requires the tongue to travel from the roof of the mouth to the back in one motion. Saying the two names alternately, slowly, is the best available exercise for separating the three sibilants. Puṣkarekṣaṇā adds kṣ, a guttural k with a retroflex ṣ, which is a single cluster and not two syllables.

Watch the vowel in pūjyā. It is long — pū, not pu — and it is the only one of the five p-names in the line that has a long vowel in its first syllable. Under speed the line tends to flatten into five identical openings, and that one long ū is the thing that keeps it from being a stutter.

What the verse asks of the reciter is a small adjustment of attitude at the halfway point. The first line is about connoisseurship, about knowing and storing what is fine, and it is easy to chant in a manner that matches — deliberate, savouring, slightly self-admiring. The second line will not support that. It is five short words about being well-fed, being old, being owed reverence, and having a face, and it should be said plainly. The verse has arranged its own correction, and the correction only works if the second line is not performed.