Deep, proud, greedy for song — and half of another body

Gambhīra is used in Sanskrit of water, of a voice, and of a person, and in each case it means that there is more below the surface than any sounding will reach. It needs no unpacking; what is worth noticing is that it stands first in a line whose other three names are all, in different ways, about limits and appetites.

Gaganāntasthā places her at the far edge of the sky. Gagana is one of several words for the atmosphere or the void, and taken literally the name puts her at the boundary of space, which is the boundary of the material order, since space is the subtlest element and the first produced. Practitioners also read the compound inwardly: the yogic literature speaks of an interior sky and of a point above the crown where the ascending breath and attention terminate, and on that reading the end of the sky is a place in the practitioner. Neither reading cancels the other.

Garvitā, the proud, is the name in this verse most likely to trouble a reader coming from a devotional literature that prizes humility. Garva in ordinary usage is a vice, the swollen self-regard that a religious life is supposed to dismantle, and Sanskrit ethical writing is severe about it. Applied to her the word inverts: pride is a fault in a creature because a creature has something above it and is pretending otherwise, and where there is nothing above, the same bearing is simply accuracy. The hymn is willing to use the vocabulary of vice for her because the vices are defined relationally and she is not in the relation. Readers who soften such names into compliments generally end up with something duller than the text.

Gānalolupā is the same move in a warmer register. Lolupa is an intensive formation and means covetous, greedy, ardently longing for something; it is not a polite word. To say that she is greedy for song is to say that music is the thing she cannot resist, and the tradition takes this practically rather than poetically: it is a statement about what draws her to a place. Her minister-goddess Śyāmalā is depicted with the vīṇā and is the patron of music in the retinue, and the hymn's own existence as something sung rather than read is the most immediate evidence for the name. A stotra that says its addressee is greedy for song has said something about why it is a stotra.

Kalpanārahitā opens the second line by removing something. Kalpanā is fabrication, imagining, the mind's construction of a determinate object out of what is given — from √kḷp, to arrange or make fit. The word is a term of art. In yoga, vikalpa is the awareness that follows words and has no object behind them, and the practice aims at states where construction has stopped. In Buddhist epistemology the classical definition of perception is that it is free of kalpanā, and kalpanāpoḍha, purged of construction, is one of the most argued-over terms in Indian philosophy. The name places her on the far side of that line: not merely unimagined by anyone in particular, but not the kind of thing construction produces.

Kāṣṭhā is a fine old word. Its concrete sense is the goal or winning post of a racecourse, the mark at the end of the run, and from there it becomes the highest point, the limit past which there is no further degree. In the treatises on time-reckoning it is also a small fixed unit made up of a number of eye-blinks. The Kaṭha Upaniṣad uses it in the first sense when it climbs its ladder of principles and says of the highest that it is the goal and the ultimate destination, and that usage is almost certainly what the hymn draws on.

The verse ends with a pair. The written text reads kāṣṭhā'kāntā, and the little hook of the avagraha is doing real work: kāṣṭhā ends in long ā, akāntā begins with short a, and the short vowel is swallowed entirely by the long one, so that nothing in the spoken sound distinguishes she who has no beloved from she who is the beloved. The mark is the only thing on the page telling a reader which of the two is meant. Taken as akāntā, with the negative, the name is glossed as having no other lover, and the following name explains why: kāntārdhavigrahā, whose body is half her beloved's. This is Ardhanārīśvara, the form in which Śiva and the goddess occupy one body split down the middle, the right side male with matted hair and ash, the left female with a breast, an earring and a curve at the hip. The image is ancient in Indian sculpture, at Elephanta and across the medieval temple corpus, and it is the most economical statement the iconography can make of a position this whole tradition holds: that god and his power are not two things in a relationship but one thing describable from two sides. The two names are therefore not a compliment followed by a fact. The second is the argument for the first.

The first line is four names beginning with g, and the sound to fix is the Sanskrit g, always hard as in "go" and never soft as in "gem," including before the vowels where English would soften it. Gambhīrā has the cluster mbh, a labial nasal followed by an aspirated labial stop: the lips stay closed from the m through the bh and open on the breath. Do not let it become "gam-beera" with an unaspirated b.

Gaganāntasthā is a compound of gagana and antasthā, joined by the contraction of a short a with a short a into a long ā, and the length of that ā is what tells the ear where the join is. The word ends with sthā, dental s into aspirated dental th, the same cluster met in viviktasthā four verses earlier.

The line's real trap is that garvitā and gānalolupā both begin ga- and are short, so at speed one of them can vanish without the ear noticing. Fix them by sense — bearing, then appetite — as with the pra- names earlier in this part of the hymn.

The second line is four names in k, and Sanskrit k is unaspirated: there should be no puff of breath after it, unlike the English k of "king." Holding the back of the hand in front of the mouth while saying kāṣṭhā is the standard way to check. That word also gives ṣṭh, retroflex sibilant into aspirated retroflex stop, with the tongue curled back for both.

Kalpanārahitā is kalpanā plus rahitā with the two ās contracting, and its lpa cluster wants a clean l with the tongue at the teeth. The name after it is the passage that most needs care. Kāṣṭhā'kāntā is chanted as kāṣṭhākāntā, one continuous stretch, with no pause at the avagraha and no attempt to sound the swallowed a. The mark is for the reader, not the singer. Since the negative prefix is inaudible, a reciter who has only ever learned the hymn by ear may not know the a is there at all.

Kāntārdhavigrahā closes the verse with rdh, an r followed by an aspirated dental, which is easier if the r is treated as closing the preceding syllable rather than opening the next: kān-tār-dha-vi-gra-hā.

For archanā the datives run gambhīrāyai, gaganāntasthāyai, garvitāyai, gānalolupāyai, kalpanārahitāyai, kāṣṭhāyai, akāntāyai and kāntārdhavigrahāyai. Here the negative prefix does become audible, because the nāmāvalī separates the names and oṃ akāntāyai namaḥ cannot be confused with oṃ kāntāyai namaḥ. That is one practical reason the nāmāvalī form of the hymn matters and is not merely a devotional expansion of it: it disambiguates what continuous recitation runs together.

As for what the verse asks: it is one of the few places in the hymn that says something about the act of singing while it is being sung. Gānalolupā claims that song is what she wants, which puts the person chanting in an oddly reciprocal position — the offering is the thing the recipient is described as greedy for. Held alongside kalpanārahitā two names later, it also sets a limit on the enterprise. What is being offered is sound, not a picture; the verse says in so many words that she is not what imagining produces.