The scarlet flower, the girl, and the woman of the house

The bandhūka is Pentapetes phoenicea, called in English the noon flower or scarlet mallow, and its habit is part of what the name conveys: the flowers open around midday and are spent by the following morning. Sanskrit poets use it as a standard measure of a particular red, not the pale flush of dawn and not the deep red of the pomegranate blossom but a saturated scarlet. Prakhyā, from pra-√khyā, to become visible, means look or appearance, and the compound is a bahuvrīhi — she whose look is that of the bandhūka flower. Redness is not ornamental in this tradition. It is the colour under which she is visualised in the meditation verses that precede the recitation, the colour of aruṇa, of the sun just risen, and of desire understood as the productive force of the world rather than as a private appetite. The hymn has reached for other red flowers earlier; here the comparison returns at exactly the point where the vocabulary begins to shift from cosmology to the ordinary.

Bālā does two things at once. It is the plain Sanskrit word for a girl who has not grown up. It is also, in this school, the name of a deity and of her mantra: Bālā, or Bālā Tripurasundarī, whose formula is short — commonly given as three syllables against the fifteen of the principal vidyā — and who is in many lineages the first mantra an initiate receives. Traditions differ on how she stands to Lalitā, some describing her as a daughter, others as Lalitā herself in a younger form, and the disagreement is not one the sources try to settle. What matters for reading the name here is that a large part of the tradition's beginning practice hangs on this single word. It is also worth noticing that the very next verse will call her pūrvajā, born before everything. Girl and elder of the world, two lines apart, and no commentator treats this as a problem needing a solution.

Līlā is play, and it is the standard Indian answer to the question of why a being that lacks nothing should act at all. If creation met a need it would not be the act of a complete being; if it were compelled it would not be free; so it is called play, which is activity without motive outside itself. Vinodinī sharpens this. Vinoda is diversion or amusement, from vi-√nud, to push away — literally what pushes tedium off. The word is lighter than līlā and slightly more human, and putting the two together gives a compound that says she is diverted by her own play. This is not a claim that the world is trivial. The seriousness of it belongs to those who are inside it, which is a different matter from whether it cost her anything.

The four su- names that fill the second line move through the categories of household good fortune. Maṅgala is auspiciousness in the most concrete sense: the good sign, the favourable moment, the thing whose presence makes an undertaking likely to succeed, and sumaṅgalī is also the ordinary word in much of India for a woman whose husband is living. Sukhakarī makes sukha, ease, the state of a well-fitted axle in its socket, which is the old sense underneath the word. Suveṣāḍhyā uses āḍhya, rich in, wealthy in: she is not merely well dressed but abundantly supplied with dress and ornament. That the goddess is worshipped clothed and adorned is not incidental in this liturgy, where robing and ornamenting are two of the standard services offered to her in the rite.

Suvāsinī, the last name, is the one to be careful with. Monier-Williams gives two senses: a woman residing in her father's house, and a courtesy term for a woman whose husband is alive. In the ritual practice of this school the word has a definite referent — the living woman who is seated, fed, and worshipped as the goddess in the suvāsinī pūjā, a rite that the next verse takes up by name. The social category behind it is specific and belongs to a particular order of life, married and not widowed, and a modern reader is better served by seeing that plainly than by translating it into something more comfortable. What is not merely social is the ritual claim: the worship is offered to a person, in the room, and the tradition holds that it arrives where worship offered to the image arrives.

This is one of the tidiest verses in the hymn for a reciter, because the names and the metrical feet coincide exactly. Bandhūkakusumaprakhyā is eight syllables and fills the first quarter by itself. Bālā and līlāvinodinī fill the second, two plus six. The whole second line is four names of four syllables each, sumaṅgalī sukhakarī, then suveṣāḍhyā suvāsinī. Nothing straddles a boundary, so the anuṣṭubh will hold its shape as long as you do not hurry.

The danger is the su- run. Four names in a row open with the same syllable, and two of them, sumaṅgalī and sukhakarī, share their shape as well as their opening: four syllables, feminine ī-stem, the same rhythm. Reciters transpose these or repeat one. Fix them by sense rather than by sound — auspiciousness first, then ease, then dress, then the woman herself — and the order will hold.

There are three consonant clusters worth slowing over. In bandhūka the n is fully dental and the dh that follows it is a single aspirated dental, not d plus h; the ū after it is long, and clipping it is the commonest fault in the word. Prakhyā ends the compound with kh plus y, an aspirated guttural running straight into the palatal glide with no vowel between. In sumaṅgalī the ṅ is the guttural nasal, made at the same place as the g that follows, which is why it is written with its own letter; if you say it as an English n the word loses its resonance. Suveṣāḍhyā has the hardest cluster in the verse: ṣ is retroflex, ḍh is a voiced aspirated retroflex, and ḍhy is that sound followed by y. Take it slowly with the tongue curled back for both retroflexes and it becomes stable.

The verse is also a good place to hear the difference between the three sibilants, since ś and ṣ and s all appear: the ś of śobhana-type words is palatal, the ṣ of suveṣā is retroflex, the s of su- is dental and identical to the English s.

For recitation as archanā, where each name is offered in the dative with namaḥ, this verse teaches the two feminine endings side by side. The ā-stems take -āyai: bandhūkakusumaprakhyāyai namaḥ, bālāyai namaḥ, suveṣāḍhyāyai namaḥ. The ī-stems take -yai, with the long ī becoming the glide y: līlāvinodinyai namaḥ, sumaṅgalyai namaḥ, sukhakaryai namaḥ, suvāsinyai namaḥ. Saying the seven in order is about as compact a drill in that alternation as the hymn offers.

As for what the verse asks of the person chanting it, the answer is unusually plain. Everything named here is available at the scale of a house: colour, youth, play, good fortune, ease, good clothes, and a woman in the next room who is to be treated as the goddess. In households that keep this liturgy, the suvāsinī named at the end of the verse is invited, seated, given cloth and food, and honoured before the recitation is closed. The hymn does not descend to the domestic as a concession. It is stating where it expects to be met.