NIAS Wednesday Discussion
What’s “Traditional” about Traditional Medicine?
Speaker : Pushya A. Gautama
Senior Project Associate, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore
@ : pushya@nais.res.in
Chairperson : Anant Kamath
Assistant Professor, School of Social Sciences, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore
@ : anant.kamath@nias.res.in
Date : 20th May, 2026
Time : 9.30 AM
Venue : Lecture Hall
Abstract: The binary between “traditional” and “modern” medicine has been extensively critiqued within scholarship, not least for its deeply colonial roots and its tendency to reproduce fixed and non-reflexive orientations toward medical knowledge systems. In this framing, “modern medicine” is routinely equated with biomedicine, while a vast and heterogeneous range of other healing practices are gathered together under the category of “traditional medicine.” Despite sustained theoretical challenges, this classificatory logic continues to structure both popular and academic discourse, often uncritically stabilising a hierarchy of epistemic legitimacy.
What is striking, however, is the sheer internal incoherence of what gets assembled under the label “traditional medicine.” Systems with radically different histories, geographies, and epistemic commitments are made to sit together under a single name. Antiquity does not unify them, nor does a shared civilisational origin. Unani emerges from Central Asian and Greco-Arabic intellectual worlds and enters South Asia only around eight centuries ago; Sowa Rigpa is grounded in Tibetan scholastic and medical formations; homeopathy, by contrast, is a more recent European invention from the late eighteenth century. What holds this eclectic assemblage together is hardly shared substance, but rather a shared alterity—their positioning as biomedical "others".
In this context the talk will explore, what then, if anything, can be considered 'traditional' about traditional medicine?
About the speaker: Pushya A Gautama (MD, PhD) is a formally trained Ayurveda physician and scholar. Her research interests include the philosophy of health and illness in Ayurveda, the phenomenology of healing and body in Ayurvedic textual and practice traditions, and the interfaces between Ayurveda and local healing traditions in South India. She is also interested in exploring the ethics and modalities of assessing Ayurvedic clinical interventions.