From the woman in the room to the point at the centre

The first thing to see is a word boundary that the printing has hidden. What is written as a single stretch, suvāsinyarcanaprītā''śobhanā, is two names run together: prītā ends the first, and the second begins with a long ā that the sandhi absorbs. The two avagraha marks are the editor's signal that a vowel has been swallowed there, and this edition's list of names in the dative confirms which vowel it was, since it gives āśobhanāyai rather than śobhanāyai. The distinction is not trivial. Āśobhanā is a prādi formation, the preverb ā- attached directly to the adjective, and it carries the sense of thoroughness or extent — beautiful out to every edge, rather than simply beautiful. A reciter who has only ever met the name inside the running text may never have known there were two names at that joint at all.

Arcana is the ordinary word for the act of honouring — offering flowers, water, food, cloth — and prītā is the past participle of √prī, to please. What the name asserts is that this honouring, when it is directed at living women, arrives. The rite behind it, the suvāsinī pūjā, is a real and well-attested part of household and temple practice in this tradition: a woman is invited, seated, given cloth and food and turmeric, and treated for the duration as the goddess present. The closely related worship of a young girl, the kumārī pūjā performed widely during Navarātri, works on the same principle, and the hymn has just called her bālā, a girl, three names earlier. The claim being made is not that the woman symbolises the goddess. It is that the worship terminates in the goddess, which is why the name is built on prītā, pleased, rather than on any word for approval.

Bindutarpaṇasantuṣṭā moves in the opposite direction, to the most interior act available. Tarpaṇa comes from √tṛp, to be satisfied, and in ordinary Hindu practice it is the water poured out for gods, sages and ancestors; santuṣṭā, from the same family of ideas, is being fully contented. The bindu is the point at the centre of the Śrīcakra, the innermost of its nine enclosures, where the goddess is invoked and where the worship of the diagram ends. So in the space of one line the verse has named the outermost social form the worship can take and the most inward and technical one, and has used the same grammar for both: she is pleased by this, she is contented by that. It should be said that the vocabulary here is capable of more than one reading. Bindu and tarpaṇa both carry further senses in the kaula literature, and the traditions that transmit this hymn have not read such names uniformly, some keeping strictly to the libation poured at the centre of the drawn diagram and others taking the terms in the more esoteric registers those words have elsewhere. The divergence is old and real, and a reader is better off knowing that it exists than being handed one reading as though it were the only one.

Pūrvajā, born before, is the plain Sanskrit term for the elder-born or the first-born, used of an older brother in ordinary speech. Applied here it cannot mean priority in time, since a school that calls her the source of time cannot also date her. What it means is priority in order of dependence: whatever else is produced presupposes her and she presupposes nothing. It is worth noticing that this name stands a verse and a half after bālā, the girl. The hymn is content to let the youngest and the oldest words in its vocabulary sit that close together, and the commentators generally treat the pairing as deliberate rather than as an accident of composition.

Tripurāmbikā closes the verse by putting the tradition's oldest name for her beside its plainest. Tripurā, she of the three cities, is a name older than the systematised Śrīvidyā that this hymn belongs to, and an entire sequence of names earlier in the text is built on it. The three have been unpacked in many ways — three worlds, the three states of waking, dreaming and dreamless sleep, the three strands of nature, the three segments of the fifteen-syllabled mantra — and the multiplicity of explanations is itself the point, since what the number marks is a completed structure rather than any particular three things. Ambikā, set against all that, is simply mother, and it is the word the last verse of the hymn will use again.

The first line is the hardest thing to chant in this part of the hymn, and the difficulty is exactly the one the printing warns about. Count the syllables: suvāsinyarcanaprītā is eight, a complete quarter of the verse, and śobhanā śuddhamānasā is another eight. The metre only works because the initial ā of āśobhanā has been absorbed into the ā that ends prītā. Restore the vowel and the line has nine syllables and is broken. So the elision is not an optional euphony; it is what makes the verse scan, and it falls precisely at the joint between the two quarters. Breathe after prītā, at the caesura, and let the following syllable be a bare śo.

Within the first name there are two clusters that go wrong under speed. Suvāsinyarcana has ny, a dental nasal running into the palatal glide, and then rc, the r released cleanly before the palatal c. Neither should be smoothed into an English approximation; take the name at half speed until the four syllables sinyarcana are distinct.

Bindutarpaṇasantuṣṭā rewards attention for a different reason. The ṇ of tarpaṇa is retroflex, and it is retroflex because of a rule: within a word, a preceding r or ṣ turns a following dental n into the retroflex ṇ across certain intervening sounds. Once you notice this you will start seeing it everywhere in the hymn, and pronouncing it correctly is the difference between the name sounding Sanskrit and sounding read off a page. The ending is a second retroflex pair, ṣṭ, the sibilant and stop both made with the tongue curled back; santuṣṭā should not be allowed to become santhustha.

The second line is metrically easy. Bindutarpaṇasantuṣṭā fills a quarter by itself, and pūrvajā tripurāmbikā divides three and five. Keep the ū of pūrvajā long and the ā of tripurāmbikā long, and the quarter balances without effort.

When the names are used for archanā, in the dative with namaḥ, the hidden boundary in the first line reappears on its own, because the two names are then said separately: suvāsinyarcanaprītāyai namaḥ, and then āśobhanāyai namaḥ with its initial ā fully sounded. This is one of the small ways in which the two ways of using the text — continuous recitation and name-by-name offering — teach each other. If you only ever chant the verse you will not hear the second name; if you only ever do the archanā you will not feel why the elision is necessary.

What the verse asks is harder than what it says. It places the honouring of a woman who is in the room and the pouring of a libation at a point on a diagram side by side, in the same grammatical construction, with no indication that one is the real worship and the other its outward shadow. A practitioner who finds the interior act more serious than the social one, or the reverse, is being corrected in the space of two names.