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Abstract

Ayurveda is one of the longstanding traditional medical systems practiced in India. With the rise and institutional dominance of biomedicine, the practice, perception, and institutional positioning of Ayurveda have undergone significant transformation. Although India’s healthcare landscape remains pluralistic, the interaction of colonial legacies, global scientific standards, educational hierarchies, and government policy has produced an implicit medical order in which biomedicine occupies epistemic and institutional authority. This thesis examines how these historical, political, cultural, and epistemological conditions shape the ways integrative medicine is understood, negotiated, and practiced in perinatal and reproductive healthcare in urban cities like Mumbai, Thane and Navi Mumbai in Maharashtra. Rather than treating integration as a coherent policy objective, it asks: How do these layered structural realities influence how integration is perceived, enacted, or resisted? And how do Ayurvedic and biomedical practitioners navigate this uneven terrain while providing care in perinatal contexts? Drawing on semi-structured interviews with practitioners from both systems, and grounded in hospital and institutional ethnography, the study situates clinics as microcosms of broader structural tensions, illuminating the gap between policy discourse and everyday clinical practice. It argues that integrative reproductive care is not a linear or unified project, but a contingent and improvised process shaped by institutional authority, infrastructural constraints, professional training, and divergent epistemic commitments.