Ayurvedic psychiatry is one of many highly dynamic indigenous medical fields addressing mental health problems. Proponents of global mental health – and most allopathic psychiatrists and health policy makers in India – ignore indigenous medicine when they talk about the “treatment gap” in many lower- and middle-income countries such as India (Chisholm et al. 2016; Patel and Thornicroft 2009): that is, the difference between the number of people estimated to need treatment for mental illness and the number actually receiving it. While this ignorance persists amongst many proponents of global mental health, the recently published report of the Lancet Commission on global mental health and sustainable development (2018) provides hope in arguing for “respecting the complementary role of […] local traditional approaches to treatment” (Patel et al. 2018).

By highlighting the existence and significance of Ayurvedic mental health care, I challenge the notion of a “treatment gap” in India. At the same time, focusing on Ayurvedic psychiatry as an alternative to globalised biomedical psychiatry and highly dynamic field, I go beyond the usual dichotomy of global psychiatry and local traditional healing by showing how a (re)invented tradition assembles local bio-moral embodied minds, classic texts, vernacular practices, and globalised psychiatric and psychological knowledge to know and treat distressed, embodied minds. Against the narrative of traditional medicine as the epistemic “other” to Western psychiatry, I will describe how Ayurvedic psychiatrists engage elements of globalised psychiatry and psychology while stressing Ayurveda's epistemic difference and embodied alterities.

Global mental health is something that everyone supports: Who does not want everyone on the planet to be mentally well? But what does it mean to be mentally healthy, or mentally ill? What concepts of “mind”, “health”, and “illness” are applied, by whom, and with what authority? What visions of global mental health have been articulated, and by whom? Must one choose between them, and if so, how? In recent years, one particular vision of global mental health has come to dominate the field, and its answers to these questions have become increasingly influential. The Movement for Global Mental Health (henceforth MGMH) is a worldwide assemblage of psychiatrists, psychologists, government agencies, medical doctors, public health professionals, health policy makers, private foundations, medical journals, and others “committed to collective actions that aim to close the treatment gap for people living with mental disorders worldwide, based on two fundamental principles: evidence on effective treatments and the human rights of people with mental disorders” (Patel et al. 2011). It rose to prominence in 2008 following a series of articles in one of the world's leading medical journals that culminated in a call “to scale up the coverage of services for mental disorders in all countries, but especially in low-income and middle-income countries” (Chisholm et al. 2007, 1241; for the genealogies of global mental health cf. Ecks 2016 and this volume; Lovell et al. 2019).

This paper is concerned with one of the features typically associated with genderlectal differentiation in language, namely tag questions. It investigates the repertoire of tag questions in Indian English, comprising both canonical and non-canonical tags such as invariant isn’t it and the indigenous forms no/na. Both a quantitative and a qualitative approach are chosen. Firstly, we apply a multifactorial analysis to the data derived from the private dialogues in the International Corpus of English for India (ICE-India) in order to determine the interplay of (sociolinguistic) context factors for the occurrence of specific tag question types. Secondly, we consider patterns of social interaction and their linguistic correlates in all-female, all-male, and mixed-group conversations, thus trying to establish locally meaningful uses of tags. We also offer some general considerations on the feasibility of integrating more recent sociolinguistic approaches towards the category of gender in corpus-linguistic research.

INTRODUCTION

The global spread of English in new forms and functions has prompted several suggestions for updates on existing taxonomies or altogether new models of the evolution of Englishes. While most researchers would readily concur with the pronouncement that “recent realities seem to be rendering the ENL [English as a Native Language] – ESL [English as a Second Language] distinction increasingly obsolete” (Schneider 2007: 13), the debate about a similar blurring of the boundaries between ESL/ Outer Circle and EFL (English as a Foreign Language)/Expanding Circle is still in full swing, as this volume testifies. The editors’ own proposal, the Extra- and Intra-territorial Forces (EIF) Model, is designed to ‘decolonise’ (in the sense of Edwards [2016]) Schneider's Dynamic Model of the evolution of postcolonial Englishes (PCEs) in order to include “those types of traditionally Expanding Circle Englishes which appear to be developing into second-language varieties of English even without a (post)colonial history” (Buschfeld and Kautzsch 2017: 105). Schneider himself put forward the notion of ‘Transnational Attraction’ to come to terms with “English in emergent contexts” (Schneider 2014: 24) which do not fit readily into his original model. Yet another framework by Mair (2013) goes one step further in incorporating globalization and transnationalism as constitutive for the dynamics of ‘the world system of Englishes’.

This chapter focuses on the first two models and attempts to tease out each proposal's explanatory potential with respect to speakers of English in India situated at both ends of the lectal continuum. For the young urban middle class, English is a natural part of their linguistic repertoire and arguably also an integral part of their identity. For the large majority of the less affluent, rural population, however, English is a foreign language and a much sought-after commodity for upward social mobility (cf. Uma et al. 2014). We will present the results from an attitude study carried out in and among Mumbai and other parts of Maharashtra, documenting the extent of English usage in different domains vis-a-vis the local languages, as well as Hindi as the overarching official language besides English (cf. Satyanath 2015). Another focus of the study is speakers’ differential attitudes towards English as an identity carrier within their respective social contexts.

From a bird’s-eye perspective, the English language in South Asia has developed from a contested colonial legacy into an asset within the linguistic ecology of the region, both intra-nationally and pan-regionally. With more and more speakers and contexts of use in a population of well over a billion, English has become a firmly entrenched South Asian language with distinctive characteristics, effectively the third-largest variety of English worldwide. This chapter outlines the sociohistorical background to the development of English in South Asia from the beginning of British colonialism in the area to the present day. The main focus is on English in India as the largest state to emerge out of the former British Raj and arguably the historical input variety to other South Asian Englishes. In presenting distinctive features of Indian English vis-à-vis other South Asian Englishes, the notion of Indian English as the regional epicenter is also taken into account.