Customer Reviews

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

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Readers, scholars and admirers of the Indic epic "Ramayana" and students and scholars of the Sanskrit language must offer profuse thanks to Prof. Peter Scharf, for putting before us a "Labour of Love" in his publication : Ramopakhyana, the Story of Rama in the Mahabharata. The work comprises chapters 258 to 275 of the Aranyaka Parvan of the Indic epic "Mahabharata". But apart from the Ram saga, the book serves as an independent-study resource for students who have completed a basic survey of Sanskrit grammar. Following in the linguistic traditions set forth in the bench mark publication of Sargeant Winthrop's, The Bhagavad Gita, Dr. Scharf provides a liguistic apparatus that
will delight and amaze even the most astute of Sanskrit scholars.
The Devanagari and Roman fonts and the layout of other materials is simply superb on each page. The press of RoutledgeCurzon must be congratulated for bringing forth such a finely edited text. Needless to add such a massive work must include some typographical errors, notably an outstanding one on page 71, but the typographical errors may actually serve to sharpen the astute thinking of students and readers alike. I have no doubts this work will serve as a standard reference source for many years and I hope and pray that other Indic and Sanskrit scholars will emulate this work, to provide in a similar format the entire translations of the the four Vedas, the Mahabharata and the 18 Mahapurans.

This book is best suited for someone who has at least some Sanskrit, but for the student who has the basics, but is weak on vocabulary, this is an excellent text. The layout is similar to Sargeant's edition of the Bhagavad-Gita, but S gives a more complete syntactic overview and each verse has a prose retelling (in devanagari only), which is quite good for the intermediate student to practice vocabulary, grammar, and reading.

With over 700 verses, this is an extensive text. There are some typos, but they should not trouble the average student.

In addition to the other reviewers I would like to say something about the general set up of the book.

The core of the book is the text of the Ramopakhyana (the story of Rama as it appears in the Mahabharata). There is one page (sometimes two) for each verse. Apart from a high quality Devanagari text of each verse you get:

- A transcription of the Sanskrit text in the Latin alphabet.
- The resolution of the sandhi used, with an interlinear annotation giving the exact grammatical classification of the word in question (for instance: "third person, dual. active, perfect" in case of a verb).
- A glossary, containing all the words that appear in the verse, including the complete derivation (compounds, nominal derivates etc.).
- A Sanskrit prose paraphrase.
- Grammatical, textual, contextual and other notes.
- An English translation.

It would seem that you need to be a Sanskrit scholar to be able to appreciate the book, nothing is less true. If you are only able to decipher Sanskrit from a text presented in a Latin transcription, maybe using some grammar and/or dictionary and want to go ahead "doing something", this is your book. If you want to practice reading Devanagari, this is your book. If you want to practice resolving sandhi, this is your book. If you ... , well, there is a chapter in this book called "Suggestions for Use", anyway, this is your book!

Apart from the text there is an extensive Introduction covering all kind of aspects connected to the text.

The Devanagari text contains some typos. The most obvious one is on page 71, the title page of the text part. The "o" has changed into an "a", resulting in "ramapakhyana" instead of "ramopakhyana". As up to now, this is the only typo I found I don't expect the text to be overloaded with them. Because there is also a latin transcription and a resolution of the sandhi, typos will not be difficult to detect and resolve.

Scharf's fully annotated edition of the storey of Rama is just mind-blowing and endearing work.He seems he has not spared anything.He gives you Sanskrit script and then with transliteration and the tanslation and lengty explanations.
After finishing this book I will continue with Bhagavad Gita published by Suny Series.

The best I ever met in my studying sanskrit. Perfect glossary and gramatical analysis. In addition, digital audio recording of the text is available in the Sanskrit Library at sanskritlibrary.org of Brown University.
Thanks for Peter Scharf's excellent job.

This is an excellent and extremely useful resource for those who know some Sanskrit and want to keep working on it. Very well produced.
We are indebted to the author.