Description of Rāmopākhyāna—the story of Rāma in the Mahābhārata: an independent-study reader in Sanskrit. By Peter M. Scharf. 2023. Revised edition in Roman.

Consisting of about 25,000 verses in Valmiki's Ramayana, the story of Rama was summarized in 704 verses in eighteen chapters in the Ramopakhyana, which comprises chapters 258--275 of the Aranyaka Parvan of the great epic Mahabharata. The story is introduced in chapter 257 and given an afterword in chapter 276 which bring the number of verses in this book to 728.

The present independent-study edition of the Ramopakhyana is suitable for students who have completed an introductory Sanskrit course to continue reading Sanskrit on their own, but it may also be used in a second-year Sanskrit course, or by beginning Sanskrit students. The edition brings 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.

This publication is a revision of the first edition of the Ramopakhyana published by Routledge/Curzon in 2003. The revised edition appears in a Devanagari version as well as this Roman version. The Devanagari edition has all citations of Sanskrit in Devanagari script but still provides a standard Romanization of each verse in addition. This Roman version has sandhi analysis, glossary and notes, as well as Sanskrit appendices, in Romanized Sanskrit as in the first edition.