Dear Antonia (and the list),

Well, only slightly tongue in cheek, I would make a plea for Nala. It is the text that connects so many of us who study Sanskrit outside India.  I've recently written a short history of this (Tull. 2015. "Whence Sanskrit? A Brief History of Sanskrit Pedagogy in the West." International Journal of Hindu Studies 19, 1–2: 213–256).

Here is the introduction...a bit of revealing history!

Since the inception of teaching Sanskrit in the West, there is hardly a student of the language who has not encountered (if not committed to memory) these words from the Nala episode (Mahåbhårata 3.50–78). While this excerpt is most often encountered in Charles Rockwell Lanman’s A Sanskrit Reader, first published in 1884, but still widely in use, Nala as a Sanskrit student’s first text hearkens back to the work of Franz Bopp, one of the first Europeans to study Sanskrit outside India. In 1819, Bopp published the Nala story in Sanskrit with an accompanying Latin translation and notes (also in Latin) in what was the first Sanskrit “reader” to appear in the West, Nalus, Carmen Sanscritum e Mahàbhàrato. Bopp’s Nalus remained one of the standard first texts for Sanskrit students for more than a half-century (Whitney 1869: 339) and established a strong precedent for using the Nala story as a beginner’s text; indeed the story recurs in virtually every Sanskrit reader published in the nineteenth century: Otto von Böhtlingk (1845), Monier Monier-Williams (1860), Georg Bühler (1877), Adolf Friedich Stenzler (1885), and most importantly, in Charles Rockwell Lanman’s Reader. (Lanman’s version of Nala followed Bühler’s version [Lanman 1884: v].)

Of course, it may be time to move on, also!

best,

Herman Tull