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While life expectancy has risen sharply in the recent past, years of wellness and good health have remained fairly stagnant.

People seem to suffer more physical, emotional and spiritual problems than ever before. Modern medicine seems powerless to address the issues that confront us in the present times.

As a result, more and more people have been turning to the wisdom of the past in their quest for a more fulsome and a healthier way of life. The book presents original texts on healthy mind, body and spirit rendered into modern idiom.

This book is a comparative study of Hyderabadi emigrants settling in Pakistan, the United Kingdom, Australia, the United States, Canada, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates at the end of the twentieth century. Based on ten years of fieldwork and extensive interviews, it traces Hyderabadi culture and institutions in these places of settlement, looking at the different versions of Hyderabadi history transmitted and the personal networks and collective bodies formed abroad. Hyderabad, Islamic, and Urdu associations, in addition to other groups are surveyed, as are the marriages of the migrants and the subsequent generations.

The author shows how memories of old Hyderabad are retained, redefined, or discarded depending on generation, gender, class, and connections to the Nizam’s former state of Hyderabad and the national narratives of the new sites of settlement.

Throughout the book, she emphasizes the role of the state in identity formation, the importance of language and religion for retention and reformulation of identities, and the instability of diasporic communities both within and across national boundaries

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