Unborn, undecaying, easily pleased — and only by those facing the right way

Ajā is the feminine of aja, unborn, and it is also, in ordinary Sanskrit, the word for a she-goat. The coincidence is the engine of one of the most discussed verses in the Upaniṣads, where a single unborn female, coloured red and white and black, gives birth to many offspring in her own likeness; one unborn male lies with her and enjoys her, and another unborn male leaves her once her enjoyment has been had. The three colours are read as the three strands of nature, and the verse has been the standard scriptural warrant for identifying ajā with prakṛti, the unborn matrix out of which everything is spun. To open a verse of this hymn with that word is to place the goddess in that position deliberately. It also sets up a difficulty the tradition has never fully resolved: the same hymn calls her the unborn source of things and the one who stands outside cause and effect altogether, and the commentators, rather than choosing, generally take the two as descriptions of the same reality seen from below and from within.

Kṣaya is built on √kṣi, to waste, and it covers everything from the waning of the moon to the wasting of a body in illness to the exhaustion of accumulated merit. The lunar sense is the one that matters most in this tradition. Śrīvidyā divides the moon into sixteen digits, of which fifteen wax and wane with the fortnight while the sixteenth, the amā-kalā, is held to remain constant and never to be spent; the goddess is identified with that digit, and a considerable amount of the tradition's symbolism, including its counting of the fifteen syllables of the mantra plus one, turns on it. Kṣayavinirmuktā is that doctrine compressed into a name, and the intensive prefix vi- on nirmuktā insists on it: not diminished, not slowed, entirely outside the arithmetic of loss.

Mugdhā is the surprise of the verse. It is the past participle of √muh, to be bewildered or to lose one's way, and its literal sense is "gone astray, confused" — the same root that gives moha, delusion, which this goddess is elsewhere said to dispel. Sanskrit developed the word in a particular direction: from bewildered to simple, from simple to unpractised, from unpractised to charming. In the classification of heroines used by dramatists and poeticians, the mugdhā is a technical category, the youngest of the types, newly arrived at womanhood and inexperienced in love, whose appeal consists precisely in her not knowing how to deploy it. The hymn takes a term from the vocabulary of secular erotic literature and applies it to the absolute, and the effect is deliberate: after two names of pure negation, a word that could have come out of a court poem.

Prasāda, in the fourth name, is a richer word than "favour" suggests. It comes from pra plus √sad, to settle, and its first meaning is the settling of sediment that leaves water clear. From there it goes in three directions at once: clarity, calm graciousness, and the food returned from an offering. To say that she is kṣipra-prasādinī is therefore to say not only that she gives quickly but that she clears quickly — the disturbance settles, the water goes transparent, and that is what her being pleased consists of.

The last two names are a matched pair and should be read as one statement. Antarmukha and bahirmukha are ordinary words for the direction of attention, and the older texts already treat outwardness as the default condition of the senses: the openings of the body were bored facing outward, so a person looks out and not into himself, and it takes a deliberate reversal of the eye to see otherwise. What is worth noticing is the exact word the hymn chooses for the outward-turned. It does not say she cannot be reached by them; it says sudurlabhā, very hard to obtain. The intensifier makes the difficulty extreme and stops short of making it absolute, and readers who take the line as a barred door are reading past the word.

Two of the six names open with the conjunct kṣ, and they sit in the same line: kṣayavinirmuktā and kṣipraprasādinī. This is not the English "ksh" of "cash home". It is k followed immediately by ṣ, the retroflex sibilant made with the tongue curled back, and the two consonants belong to a single release. Say the k lightly and let the ṣ carry the syllable. Practising the two names one after the other, slowly, is the most efficient drill for kṣ in this part of the hymn.

Kṣipraprasādinī then gives a doubled pra. There are two of them, back to back, and under speed reciters routinely produce one or three. Count them by sense rather than by ear: kṣipra, quickly, plus prasādinī, being gracious. The p is unaspirated in both, closer to the p of "spin" than of "pin".

Mugdhā turns on the cluster gdh, a voiced velar stop followed by a voiced aspirated dental. Both consonants are voiced throughout, and the aspiration belongs to the dh alone; the common error is to devoice the g into a k or to break the cluster with a vowel. The word is two syllables, mug-dhā, and the second is long.

In the second line the sandhi is worth seeing rather than memorising. Antar and bahir both end in r, but bahir is bahis in its underlying form, and the s has become r before the voiced m of mukha. This is the same process that gives punar, prātar and a long list of adverbs their shifting final consonant, and once you have it you will stop being surprised by it. The kha of mukha is an aspirated velar — k with a puff of breath after it, not the scraping sound of Scottish "loch". In samārādhyā, dhy is an aspirated dental followed by the palatal glide, run together without a gap.

The metre is regular anuṣṭubh, eight syllables to the quarter, and the break falls after kṣipraprasādinī. Ajā, at two syllables, is the shortest name in a long stretch of the hymn, and it comes at the very start of the verse where the voice is still settling; the temptation is to lengthen its first vowel to fill the space. Keep it short. The rhythm of the opening quarter depends on a short a followed by a long ā and then the heavy kṣa.

For archanā the six become ajāyai namaḥ, kṣayavinirmuktāyai namaḥ, mugdhāyai namaḥ, kṣipraprasādinyai namaḥ, antarmukhasamārādhyāyai namaḥ, bahirmukhasudurlabhāyai namaḥ. Five are ā-stems in -āyai; only kṣipraprasādinī, an ī-stem, contracts to -inyai. The last name, at twelve syllables in its dative form, is one of the longer single offerings in the sequence and needs to be planned as a single breath rather than attempted and then repaired.

What the verse asks of the reciter is contained in its second line, and it is a question rather than an exhortation. The hymn has just said that she is quick to be pleased. It then tells you what determines whether that quickness applies to you, and the criterion is not sincerity, effort or merit but which way you are facing while you say the words.