Outside cause and effect, and therefore at play

Kārya and kāraṇa are the working vocabulary of Indian philosophy rather than poetic diction, and the compound is doing technical work. Kārya is a gerundive of √kṛ — that which is to be made, hence the product; kāraṇa is the agent-instrument noun from the same root, that from which the product proceeds. The Sāṃkhya analysis that stands behind most later Hindu cosmology sorts the whole of reality by exactly this pair: root nature is cause and never effect, the intellect and the ego and the subtle elements are both cause and effect, the last sixteen principles are effect only, and the conscious self is neither. To call her nirmuktā of both is to place her where that scheme places consciousness, at the one position in the table that the chain of production does not touch. The interest of the name is that the hymn has elsewhere identified her with root nature as well, and so refuses to let the two positions stay apart.

The consequence is the doctrine of līlā, and the classical formulation of it is a single line of the Brahmasūtra which answers an objection. If the absolute is complete, it can want nothing; if it wants nothing, it has no motive to produce a world; and an act without motive is unintelligible. The reply is that the act is like play in ordinary life, which people undertake without any purpose outside itself. Śaṅkara's comment adds the familiar examples — breathing, which happens without deliberation, and the games of a king who already has everything. Play is not a lesser mode of action here. It is the only mode of action available to something that lacks nothing, and it is therefore the technical term for divine activity as such.

Taraṅgita, the participle in the second name, is built on taraṅga, a wave, itself from √tṛ, to cross over. The image of an unmoved ocean rippling into waves is one of the standard Vedāntic figures for how a changeless reality can present change, and it is a favourite of Śākta poetry in particular: the most famous hymn to this goddess is called a laharī, a flood or wave, of beauty. What the name adds is what is rippling. Kāmakeli is amorous play, keli being the ordinary word for dalliance and sport, and the compound therefore says that the erotic is not an episode in her life but the medium in which her whole surface moves. Śrīvidyā takes the union of Kāmeśvara and Kāmeśvarī as its central image of reality, and the hymn returns to that pair repeatedly; this name reports the same union as motion rather than as tableau.

A tāṭaṅka is not a small earring. It is the large disc or plug that distends the lobe, the ornament familiar from South Indian bronzes, and in ordinary usage it is the emblem of the married woman whose husband is alive. Around the great goddess temples of the Tamil country there grew up a body of tradition making that emblem cosmically load-bearing — the earrings are said to hold Śiva's own auspiciousness in place, and the periodic renewal of the tāṭaṅkas of Akhilāṇḍeśvarī at Tiruvanaikkaval, popularly credited to Śaṅkara, is performed as an act of consequence for the world and not only for the shrine. These are late and local traditions rather than anything the hymn states, but they show what kind of object the name is pointing to.

Kanat is a present participle of √kan, to shine or to be pleased, and it is rare enough to feel deliberately archaic. Placed against kanaka, gold, which the traditional etymologists derive from the same root, it produces a jingle that is also a small argument: the gold is glittering because glittering is what gold is. Vigraha, finally, in the last name, is the ordinary word for a body, and specifically for the fashioned body of an image in a shrine. Its literal sense is a taking-apart, from vi plus √grah, which is why the same noun also means a quarrel or a war. A form is a division made in what has no divisions, and the hymn calls the division a game.

This verse is one of the places where the hymn organises itself by initial sound, and three of the four names begin with the same syllable. Kāryakāraṇa, kāmakeli, kanatkanaka: three compounds in a row whose first two elements both start with k, and a reciter going at speed can easily produce one of them twice and drop another. Fix them by their subject rather than by their sound — causation, then love, then gold, then the body — and the order will hold.

Two retroflex ṇ's in the verse are there by rule rather than by accident, and hearing why makes them easier to remember. In kāraṇa and in dhāriṇī, a preceding r has pulled the dental n back to the roof of the mouth. This is the ṇatva rule, and once you notice it operating you will start predicting these retroflexes elsewhere in the hymn instead of learning them one at a time. The n of nirmuktā, which has no r before it, stays dental.

The nasal in taraṅgita is ṅ, the velar nasal, and it is followed by g. English speakers reach for the sound in "singer" and stop there; what is wanted is the sound in "finger", nasal and stop both fully present. The same cluster returns in tāṭaṅkā, where it is ṅ followed by k. That word also gives two retroflex stops, ṭ and ṭ, made with the tongue curled back and touching well behind the teeth, and they must not be allowed to soften into the dental t of the neighbouring tara-.

Length discipline matters most in the first name, which has three long ā's in eight syllables — kār, kā, and the final -tā — separated by short vowels that should stay genuinely short. If the shorts creep towards the longs the anuṣṭubh loses its shape immediately. The caesura falls after the sixteenth syllable, at the end of kāmakelitaraṅgitā, and that is the one place to breathe.

For archanā, this verse is a good exercise in the two dative endings, because it contains both. The three ā-stems take -āyai: kāryakāraṇanirmuktāyai namaḥ, kāmakelitaraṅgitāyai namaḥ, kanatkanakatāṭaṅkāyai namaḥ. The fourth name is an ī-stem, and the long ī shortens to the glide y before the ending, giving līlāvigrahadhāriṇyai namaḥ. Getting -iṇyai rather than -iṇīyai right here will serve you for the many agent nouns in -inī that the hymn still has ahead.

As for what the verse asks of the person saying it: it asks you to hold two things together that most religious language keeps apart. You are addressing something that no cause produced, and you are addressing it by way of its jewellery. The verse does not resolve that tension so much as insist that there is none, and the recitation is easier if you stop trying to decide which of the four names is the literal one.