Ramopakhyana - The Story of Rama in the Mahabharata: A Sanskrit Independent-Study Reader

Sanskrit has been the principal culture-bearing language of India for more than three millennia. The manuscripts in Sanskrit are one hundred times more numerous than those in Greek and Latin combined. Yet despite the abundance of Sanskrit literature, there has been a dearth of material available for instruction besides introductory textbooks. This fully annotated edition of the story of Rama contributes to both the instruction of the Sanskrit language and to the wider appreciation of India’s literary culture. The story of Rama is the most popular story in all of India and a classic of world literature. It is narrated in more that 35 major Sanskrit works as well as in works in modern Indian and Southeast Asian languages, and in Tibetan, Khotanese, Chinese and Japanese. The religious cultures of Jaianism, Buddhism, and Islam have adopted it, and it continues to be enacted in traditional and contemporary media. Scharf’s fully annotated edition of the story of Rama is suitable for use at a variety of levels, from beginners to advanced. It brings together all the information required for a complete comprehension of every detail of the text together in one or two pages for each verse. For each verse it provides the Devanagari text, Roman transliteration, analysis of sandhi, identification of inflection, glossary, Sanskrit prose paraphrases, syntactic and cultural notes, and an English translation. The glossary includes the stem or verbal root of each word occurring in the verse, its lexical categorization and translation, analysis of compounds, and derivation.