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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how medical pluralism is shaped through professional education in an Ayurvedic college in South India. It argues that training institutions produce epistemic bilingualism by teaching students to navigate biomedical and classical Ayurvedic knowledge.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how medical pluralism is institutionally shaped through professional education, focusing on an Ayurvedic college in South India. Rather than treating pluralism simply as the coexistence of multiple therapeutic options, I analyse how educational structures shape the epistemic conditions from which future therapeutic pathways may emerge.

Drawing on previous comparative research on the institutional integration of traditional medicine, I briefly contrast the Japanese case—where Kampō has largely been incorporated into biomedicine through epistemic reduction—with the Indian context, where Ayurveda retains a degree of institutional and diagnostic autonomy. I use this contrast as an analytical lens rather than as a direct comparison.

Ayurvedic curricula formally incorporate biomedical sciences while preserving classical diagnostic frameworks such as doṣa, nidāna, and samprāpti. Focusing on a gynaecology lecture that relates an Ayurvedic disease category to pelvic inflammatory disease, microbiome research, and biomedical pathophysiology, I examine how students are taught not merely two bodies of knowledge, but ways of relating them. I describe this pedagogical configuration as the production of epistemic bilingualism.

The analysis draws on curricular documents, teaching materials, preliminary observation, and an interview with the lecturer. Rather than assuming epistemic bilingualism to be stable or harmonious, the paper considers how comparisons between Ayurvedic and biomedical knowledge are constructed, questioned, and legitimised in the classroom. It argues that professional education does not determine therapeutic pathways directly, but shapes the epistemic and professional conditions through which future clinical reasoning and care become possible.