A hymn names her the lover of hymns

Stotra and stuti are the same root, √stu, to praise, with different suffixes, and the root is Vedic. The Ṛgveda is full of the stoma, the praise-song offered as a made thing, sometimes explicitly compared to a chariot fashioned by a craftsman for a patron. What the later stotra keeps from this is the assumption that praise is efficacious rather than decorative — that saying what a deity is has effects, and that the accuracy of the saying is part of what makes it work. What the later stotra adds is enormous scale and literary self-consciousness. By the medieval period the hymn had become one of the major Sanskrit genres, attracting first-rate poets, and the thousand-name form in particular had become a standard way for a tradition to state its entire theology in a compressed, memorable, recitable list.

A sahasranāma naming its deity a lover of hymns is therefore doing something the genre expects. The Viṣṇu Sahasranāma contains a comparable cluster in which praise, the praiser and the object of praise are all named as the deity. The move is not merely ornamental: it licenses the recitation in progress. If hymns please her, then this hymn pleases her, and the reciter is already inside the relationship the hymn describes rather than petitioning for entry into it.

Stutimatī sharpens the point by grammar. The suffix -mat is possessive, so the plain sense is that she has praise, is furnished with it, is rich in it. But in a tradition that identifies the goddess with vāc, speech itself, possession runs the other way as well: the praise directed at her is uttered by a faculty that is hers. The frame of the Lalitopākhyāna makes this concrete. The thousand names, in the story, were composed at the goddess's own command by the vāgdevatās, the eight goddesses of speech; the hymn is her speech about herself, lent to a human reciter. Read against that frame, stotrapriyā and stutimatī are not two compliments but two halves of a circuit.

Śrutisaṃstutavaibhavā extends the circuit backwards into the Veda, and here a genuine historical argument is at stake. Śrīvidyā in South India developed within, not against, a brahminical world in which Vedic authority was the currency of legitimacy, and its learned defenders were at pains to show that the goddess of the tantras is the goddess of the śruti. They had real material to work with: the Ṛgveda's tenth maṇḍala contains the sūkta in which Vāc declares in the first person that she moves with the Rudras and the Ādityas and that she supports whomever she chooses, and the Śrī Sūkta, transmitted as a khila or appendix to the Ṛgveda, addresses a golden goddess in terms any later hymn to Lakṣmī would recognise. Whether these passages amount to what a modern historian would call continuity is a separate question from whether the tradition took them to. Bhāskararāya's commentary is systematic about attaching Vedic and Upaniṣadic warrant to the names of this stotra, and the name śrutisaṃstutavaibhavā is the hymn's own statement of that programme.

The four ma- names that follow are a different kind of writing. Manas is mind, the coordinating inner faculty; the suffix -vin makes manasvin, possessed of mind, which in classical usage means intelligent, but also high-spirited, resolute. Māna is trickier, because Sanskrit has two words of that shape: one from √mā, to measure, giving māna as measurement, and one from √man, to think, giving māna as pride, self-regard, honour. Mānavatī uses the second, and the word carries both the dignity a person holds and the touchiness that guards it — in the poetry, māna is what a slighted heroine feels. Maheśī is simply the feminine of Maheśa, and the choice matters: the hymn does not call her the wife of the great lord but makes the title itself feminine. Maṅgalākṛtiḥ ends the verse with ākṛti, form or outline, a word with a technical life of its own in the grammarians' and Mīmāṃsakas' long argument over whether a word denotes an individual or the shape shared by a class. To say her ākṛti is auspiciousness is to say that auspiciousness is not something she confers but something she is shaped like.

Both lines divide four and four, then three and five. Stotrapriyā and stutimatī fill the first half of the opening line with four syllables each; śrutisaṃstutavaibhavā fills the second half by itself, eight syllables in a single word. In the second line manasvinī and mānavatī take four each, then maheśī takes three and maṅgalākṛtiḥ five. Breathe after the sixteenth syllable, at the end of śrutisaṃstutavaibhavā, and nowhere else.

The opening cluster st recurs in three successive names and is worth a moment. Sanskrit s here is dental, made with the tongue at the teeth, and the t that follows is dental too, so the two articulations share a position and the transition should be seamless — not the English st of "stop", which is made further back. Śrutisaṃstutavaibhavā puts an anusvāra in front of the same cluster: saṃ before stu. Before a dental the anusvāra is naturally realised as a dental nasal, so the word runs san-stu-ta with the nasal already at the teeth, ready for the s.

The second line is an exercise in not blurring. Four names begin with ma, and the difference between the first two is entirely in vowel length: manasvinī has a short first a, mānavatī a long one. Under speed they collapse into each other, and the collapse is inaudible to the reciter and obvious to anyone listening. Fix the contrast deliberately: ma-nasvinī short, mā-navatī long.

Maṅgalākṛtiḥ contains two things worth isolating. The ṅg is a velar nasal followed by a velar stop, the sound English has in "finger" rather than the one in "singer"; and kṛ is a syllabic ṛ, a vowel in its own right, produced with the tongue in the retroflex position, not the sequence "kri". The final visarga is a voiceless breath that carries a short echo of the preceding vowel, so the word ends kṛ-tih-i rather than with a hard stop.

For recitation as archanā the datives are mostly predictable and one is not. The ā-stems give stotrapriyāyai and śrutisaṃstutavaibhavāyai; the ī-stems give stutimatyai, manasvinyai, mānavatyai, maheśyai. But maṅgalākṛti is an i-stem noun, and its dative is maṅgalākṛtaye, ending in -aye rather than -yai. Reciters who have settled into the rhythm of the feminine endings routinely produce a wrong form here.

As for what the verse asks: it asks the reciter to notice that the hymn has just described the act of reciting it. That can be taken as a licence to relax — the praise is already acceptable, and no special quality of feeling is being demanded — or as a considerable claim about whose speech is being used. The second and third names suggest the tradition means the second.