Situating Western Biomedicine and Indian Ayurveda within the Contemporary Discourse on Institutional Healthcare in India

Most of the scholars tend to assume that medical science is primarily concerned with the problem of treatment or prevention of certain conditions referred to as "diseases", as result of which their perspective on health even if they are oriented towards social sciences and humanities, becomes limited and untenable. Moreover, even the MedicalAnthropologists, who normally hold a very critical and culturally relativistic position on many socially relevant matters, tend to define health as normative and natural state of being owing to their epistemological roots in ethnography. The present paper therefore tries to show that alternative perspectives on health and healthcare are possible by using the case of Ayurvedic Medicine which is highly integrative, holistic and isconcerned with overall well being of the individual as compared to the reductionist, and mechanistic model based Cartesian Duality of body and mind followed by the Western Biomedicine. Apparently, the real problem arises when it comes to the practice of the abovestated under pinnings of Ayurveda and Biomedicine as a part of a single policy framework at the people's level. The central thesis of the paper is therefore, to bring out the implications of the above said preposition on health and healthcare within the contemporary Indian context, as an outcome of the discourse between traditionally established medical systems as that of Ayurveda on one side, and an externally planted system of Biomedicine that came through colonization and globalization on the other.