Four names beginning in three, four names needing nothing

This is the clearest place in the hymn to see a compositional habit that governs long stretches of it. The thousand names are not arranged at random, nor strictly by topic; over and again the poet gathers names by their opening syllable and lets a cluster run until it exhausts itself. Here two clusters occupy one line each, and — this is what makes the verse worth stopping at — the boundary between the clusters is also the boundary between two ways of speaking about her. The device is not merely mnemonic. When the sound changes, the argument changes with it, and a reader who follows the initial syllables through the verses that come after this one will find dha- and vi- and ku- doing the same double work.

Trayī, the bare feminine of the numeral, is the standing Sanskrit term for the threefold Veda: the verses of the Ṛgveda, the sacrificial formulas of the Yajurveda, the chants of the Sāmaveda. The Atharvaveda is not counted in it, and the exclusion is old and deliberate, since trayī names the three that the solemn sacrifice actually requires — one priest to invite, one to perform, one to sing. To call her the trayī is to identify her not with a book but with the sound of the ritual religion in its entirety.

Trivarga is the standard name for the first three of the four human aims: dharma, the right order of conduct; artha, the material means of life; kāma, desire and its satisfaction. Sanskrit produced a separate technical literature for each, and the three together constitute the whole of worldly competence. The fourth aim, mokṣa, is conspicuously not mentioned, and the omission is doing something. She is called the abode of the three, and then the second line of the verse describes, without using the word, precisely what release would consist of: no sickness, no dependence, no need of anything outside oneself.

Tristhā is intentionally unfilled. It says that she abides in the three and does not say which three, and the commentarial tradition has supplied a long list of candidates: the three states of waking, dream and deep sleep; the three worlds; the three strands of nature; the three fires of the solemn ritual; the three segments of the fifteen-syllabled mantra. Nothing in the name adjudicates among them, and the sensible conclusion is that it is a general claim rather than a coded one — wherever the tradition counts to three, she is what all three have in common.

Tripuramālinī carries the weight of the verse. The three cities belong to one of the great destruction stories: the demon architect Maya built three flying strongholds, of gold, of silver and of iron, for three sons of a demon king, and they could be destroyed only by a single arrow at the single moment when the three aligned. Śiva took that shot, and the epithet Tripurāntaka, ender of the three cities, has been one of his commonest titles ever since; the story is told in the Mahābhārata and repeatedly in the Purāṇas, with the gods themselves serving as his chariot and the Vedas as his horses. Against that background the hymn's name is startling. She does not burn the three cities. She wears them, strung together, as an ornament. There is a second layer as well, since her own principal name in this school is Tripurā and the school is named for her: the tradition understands the three cities as the triads that structure experience — knower, knowing and known, most often — so that what Śiva destroyed in the myth is what she exhibits as jewellery. In Kashmirian Śaiva texts mālinī is also the term for a particular non-alphabetical arrangement of the Sanskrit phonemes conceived as a garland; whether the sahasranāma intends that resonance is not something the text lets us decide.

Of the second line, two words repay a dictionary. Āmaya, sickness, is built on āma, raw or undigested, and in the medical literature āma is the residue of imperfect digestion from which disease is held to arise; nirāmayā therefore says both that nothing ails her and that nothing in her is unassimilated. Ārāma, in svātmārāmā, is literally a pleasure garden, a walled place laid out for enjoyment, before it is the abstract noun "delight" — so the name says that her own self is the garden she walks in.

The first line is four names in a row beginning with the same two consonants, and it is a trap of the same kind as the mahā- run earlier in the hymn. Trayī, trivarga, tristhā, tripura: the eye slides, the tongue repeats, and a name goes missing without anyone hearing it. Fix the sequence by its widening scope — scripture first, then the aims of a life, then any triad at all, then the three cities of the myth — and it will not collapse.

The cluster tr is a dental t followed by r, and the r is a light tap of the tongue tip, not the English retracted r. Trayī and tristhā are the two to slow down over. In trayī the r is followed immediately by the vowel a and then a long ī; in tristhā the r is followed by i, and then comes sth, a dental sibilant plus an aspirated dental stop, all in one syllable. Say tris-thā with the s ending the first syllable and the aspirated th opening the second, and resist inserting a vowel between them.

The second line changes texture completely: no conjuncts at all in nirāmayā, an mb in nirālambā, and then two names built on long ā's. Nirāmayā and nirālambā are near-twins — five of their eight syllables are identical — and they must be kept apart by their fourth syllable, ma against lam.

Svātmārāmā is the mouthful. It opens with sv, a dental sibilant plus the labiodental v, then immediately tm, a dental stop plus m, and both clusters must be produced without a supporting vowel: svāt-mā-rā-mā, four syllables, three of them long ā and the first long as well. Four long vowels in a row is unusual even in this hymn.

Sudhāsṛtiḥ ends the verse and contains the one vocalic ṛ in it. This is a vowel, not a consonant cluster: the tongue is in the retroflex position and the syllable is short. Sṛ, not "sree" and not "sri". The final visarga is a light echo of the preceding vowel, and it is audible — the verse ends on breath rather than on a closed syllable.

For archanā this verse is the best available exercise in the fact that the dative ending is not always -āyai. Four of the names are ā-stems and behave predictably: trivarganilayāyai, tristhāyai, nirāmayāyai, nirālambāyai, svātmārāmāyai. Tripuramālinī is an ī-stem and gives tripuramālinyai. Trayī, also an ī-stem but a monosyllabic one, contracts to trayyai with a doubled y. And sudhāsṛti is an i-stem, the short-vowel type, which yields sudhāsṛtyai. Three different endings in eight names; if you can produce all three correctly here you will not be guessing anywhere else in the hymn.

What the verse asks is a change of footing halfway through. The first line is a list of things you already live inside — the scriptures you were taught, the goods you are pursuing, the counting by threes that organises most of what you have been told about the world. The second line withdraws all of it and leaves nothing to lean on. Reciters often find the second half of this verse easier to say than to mean, and the honest response is to notice that and keep going.