EN
The study of language and grammar is one of the most fundamental parts of an education, and India has a long and sophisticated tradition of language and grammar teaching (vyākarana) that is as old as the Indian scripts and writing themselves. Starting around the fourth century BCE with the grammatical treatises by Pānini and his commentators, the Indian grammarian tradition developed through several distinct schools of grammar and language study. A historical study of these traditions done on the basis of a normal literary history focused on the places and dates of textual composition yields a chronological overview, where certain major traditions are seen as remaining popular over time through a steady production of new texts, whereas other minor systems become replaced by the development of new schools. In contrast, a microhistorical study that assesses the popularity of the different traditions of grammar by examining their concrete textual representations in a particular manuscript collection reveals a local historical record of the popularity of each system within a specific educational community. The present essay provides a microhistorical study of the Digambara manuscript collection Āmer Śāstrabhandār from Āmer and Jaipur in Rajasthan dating from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. It contributes to the educational history of India by revealing an unexpected continued popularity of the late medieval Sārasvata grammar tradition in the Jaipur area long after this minor grammatical system otherwise has been thought to have gone out of vogue.