Hello all,
I've been learning the varnam Sumasayaka, which I'm sure you all know well, and I had a few questions about the sahityam. First here is the received text that I can find:
P: sumasāyakavidhurām ava mādhava sudatīm atidīnām
A: ramaṇī maṇiśayane tava ratilālasahṛdayā
samayaṃ bahubādhayā sakhi
C: mānini hā te tāpam
Now from this it's clear to me that the pallavi and anupallavi are separate sentences. But the anupallavi is incomplete: presumably ramaṇī is the subject, and samayam is the object, but there's no verb. Presumably the intended meaning is "the lady [ramaṇī] is spending [???] her time [samayaṃ] in great distress [bahubādhayā] on her jeweled bed [maṇiśayane], her heart longing for your love [tava ratilālasahṛdayā]."
A more minor but perhaps related issue with the anupallavi is the function of "sakhi." My first instinct is to treat it as a vocative, but the pallavi is clearly addressed to Krishna and not to the woman's sakhī. Alternately, it could be a noun in apposition with ramaṇī (in which case it would be "sakhī", which is equally consistent with the musical setting). Or---could it be that the missing verb (perhaps ending in "ati") was at some point garbled into sakhi? If the missing verb was "āyasati", then this would elegantly solve both problems while requiring only very minor musical changes to accommodate the extra "ya" syllable (one could place it on the NPPM right before where "sakhi" is now).
Another, perhaps less plausible way to "fix" the verb issue would be to hypothesize a missing svarasāhitya that completes the sentence. This hypothesis was suggested to me by the fact that Sarasālanu, the Telugu twin of this varnam, does possess a svarasāhitya.
That said, I haven't seen any textual evidence for any of this. All the written sources I can trace online give the standard verb-less text, with no sāhitya for the svara passages. I would really appreciate any thoughts about these issues, or information about variant pāṭhāntaras of this piece. Thank you!