Ayurvedic Epistemologies and Indian Culinary Traditions

A Critical Phenomenological Analysis of Dietary Knowledge Systems in India

Abstract

Ayurveda, one of the world’s oldest systems of medicine, has profoundly influenced Indian food practices, weaving together health, spirituality, and cultural history. This paper presents a theoretical framework for understanding the foundations of Ayurvedic influences on Indian culinary traditions, examining the dialectical relationship between sacred knowledge systems and embodied practice. Through a critical hermeneutical approach informed by post-structural methodologies, this research problematises conventional binary oppositions between the spiritual and corporeal dimensions of dietary practices. The examination employs a theoretical framework that draws from phenomenology, cultural semiotics, and critical theory to examine how Ayurvedic principles constitute both a discursive field and an embodied system of knowledge production. It analyses how the triadic theoretical matrix—doshas, gunas, and rasas—functions as a complex signifying system that mediates between metaphysical paradigms and material practices. This study theorises how Ayurvedic epistemologies construct and legitimate specific forms of culinary knowledge by closely examining classical Sanskrit texts, particularly the Charaka Samhita and Sushruta Samhita. The study employs Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’ and Foucault’s notion of the ‘epistemic regime’ to analyse how these principles operate as both structured and structuring forces in the formation of Indian dietary practices. The theoretical framework illuminates how Ayurvedic dietary prescriptions function as sites of cultural reproduction and contestation across various temporal and spatial contexts. Drawing on critical phenomenology, this study examines how these epistemic systems negotiate tensions between tradition and modernity, the sacred and the secular, and the local and the global. The analysis reveals how Ayurvedic principles operate as a complex theoretical apparatus that transcends conventional categorisations of medical, spiritual, and cultural knowledge systems.