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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how medical pluralism is shaped through state-regulated Ayurvedic education in South India. It shows how training institutions organise and polarise future care pathways by integrating biomedicine while sustaining classical diagnostic reasoning.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how medical pluralism is institutionally shaped through professional education, focusing on Ayurvedic colleges in South India. Rather than treating pluralism as the coexistence of multiple therapeutic options, I analyse how educational structures actively organise and polarise future therapeutic pathways.

Drawing on a comparative background of traditional medicine integration, I briefly contrast the Japanese case—where Kampō is incorporated into biomedicine through epistemic reduction—with the Indian context, where Ayurveda retains institutional and diagnostic autonomy. Using this contrast as an analytical lens, the paper centres on Ayurvedic medical education in South India and asks how epistemic plurality is sustained, negotiated, or reconfigured within training institutions.

Ayurvedic curricula formally integrate biomedical sciences while maintaining classical diagnostic frameworks such as doṣa, prakṛti, and samprāpti. I argue that this arrangement produces what may be described as epistemic bilingualism. However, rather than assuming this bilingualism to be stable, the paper interrogates how it shapes students’ orientations toward care: what kinds of diagnostic reasoning are legitimised, which therapeutic pathways become actionable, and where tensions or exclusions emerge.

The paper is informed by preparatory analysis of curricula, examinations, and regulatory frameworks, and it outlines the design of ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in three Ayurvedic colleges in South India. By treating polarisation as an institutional process rather than a binary opposition, this contribution highlights how medical pluralism is actively produced, managed, and contested at the level of professional training, with implications for the future organisation of care.