April 2022: One of us is talking to a group of Dalits from a Tamil village, mainly women. The discussion revolves around price increases, and the villagers debate which increases are most problematic, from fuel to onions and oil. ‘It is the price of gold that is a problem,’ exclaims one of them. ‘If the government wants to help us, it must lower the price of gold.’ The price of gold is indeed a permanent and daily concern. In the same discussion, another woman wonders how she will find the five gold sovereigns for her daughter's future wedding. To give less to in-laws would be to lose face but also, as we shall see, to lose the investment in her son's education and housing. Gold acts as a currency, used as a unit of account and a means of exchange for matrimonial transactions. It is also a store of value: its price has increased tenfold between 2000 and 2020, while the general consumer price index has increased threefold. Through pledging, gold is also a payment technology for daily transactions, now used to access cash to smooth out expenses and income and make ends meet. Long reserved for the dominant castes as a symbol of purity and prosperity, gold is now a currency accessible to many, even if its uses and meanings remain deep markers and drivers of social differentiation.

In this chapter we explore the political and moral economies of gold as money and its profound transformations in rural Tamil Nadu over the past two decades. The political economy of gold refers to the structural and material conditions that allow the unequal access and use of gold to occur and be sustained.

Gold ornaments play a critical role in the production of goods and services – and the sustaining of life – in India's informal sector. Held largely in the form of ornaments, the gold owned by Indian households is estimated to weigh 25,000 tonnes – which is equal in combined rupee value to about 40 per cent of the country's gross domestic product (GDP) (Pattanayak 2019). Since Independence in 1947, policymakers in India have been preoccupied with preventing gold acquisition and ownership – which they see as keeping capital idle and unproductive in addition to being a drain on foreign exchange reserves (EPW Research Foundation 2005; see discussion in Chapters 1 to 3 in this volume). Yet even from prior to the period of colonial rule1 and despite a three-decade-long set of restrictions on imports, gold has constantly been in circulation in agricultural and business cycles, in festivals and marriages.

In this chapter I show how gold has not been idle or deployed for unproductive purposes. Indeed, it is essential for production. The opening up of markets to gold imports through the 1990s came as part of broader liberalisation reforms in India. These included dismantling trade barriers on thousands of commodities. Silk, the commodity focus of this chapter, was one (Patnaik 2005). At this time, ‘monetising’ gold by promoting lending against it by banks and specialised gold loan companies became a policy priority (Vaidyanathan 1999). This reshaped the landscape of gold-based lending in India.

While this book shows how gold is produced, distributed and then deployed in socially separate stages, the same is true of many other commodities in India. Silk is no exception.

FLOWS AND CIRCUITS OF GOLD IN INDIA

Gold has been unaccountably neglected as an object of study. In this chapter, to remedy this dearth of scholarship, we use a systems approach to political economy and reconnoitre the material circuits of gold, its institutional ‘ecosystem’, relations of power and control and their impact on the distribution of wealth. In tracing the pathways and connections between its production, distribution and consumption, we pursue how and why the system of gold has continually adapted in response to a series of public policy interventions by the state, which it mostly acts to avoid. Our sources have ranged from official data, specialised press and business association reports, academic analyses and think-tank reports to granular ethnographies steeped in local field experiences. In scratching the surface, this overview – and our volume – shows how and why much more scholarly effort is needed to mine the political economy of gold.

India's gold does not originate in India. Local mining hardly figures in quantitative terms. Gold originates elsewhere but comes to India in the form of bullion or of mine-head alloys known as doré,1 mainly through Dubai, whose gold economy is umbilically connected to India’s. A great – and mostly informal – refining industry is growing in the north of India to purify the imported doré, while local scrap gold is largely recycled in the south.2 By-products from doré, such as silver, disappear into other workshops in the informal economy. Some of the new doré refineries are being added to corporate portfolios that also include other precious metals and gemstones.

Our book has shown how Indian gold is different. And since we finished the manuscript, changes have been taking place in the structure of the gold economy more rapidly than we envisaged while we were working on our histories and ethnographies. So here, in this briefest of epilogues, we pan some small and scattered nuggets from 2024 which hint at likely surprises and riches for future research.

THE CONTEXT OF PRICES (INTRODUCTION AND CHAPTERS 1, 2 AND 3)

From the fourth quarter of 2023 to that of 2024 global gold prices surged by 30 per cent. By April 2025 they had hit USD 3,400 – a further rise of 30 per cent – and showed no sign of spiking. These new demand-led peaks have been attributed to familiar processes – the role gold plays as a safe haven and hedge for central banks and retail purchasers alike. What is less familiar, however, is the context of these age-old responses: a new conjuncture involving new scales of geopolitical uncertainty, a move by some trading countries towards de-dollarisation, and domestic economic volatilities in India.

Time will tell whether the price jump was a bubble rather than a trend, but in India last quarter prices for 2024 declined rather than rose. Reasons suggested for this countercyclical Indian behaviour cover culture, policy and financialisation. They range from postponed festival sprees and the doubling of goods and services tax (GST) on crafted gold to the lure of cryptocurrencies, competitively high interest rates, and the attraction of US treasury yields (Vivek 2024; Anshul 2024).

INTRODUCTION

My mother's side of the family came to India as refugees from East Pakistan in 1947. As a result, we grew up with what my brother and I coded as ‘stories of relentless lament’. But some of the Partition lament narratives were also stories of bravery and heroism. Among those, an oft-repeated one was how our grandmother crossed the border with her four daughters, an infant son and a box of gold. When land is lost, gold offers the only hope as security for fleeing families. But these heroic stories quickly morphed into family intrigues and outright fraud, often by the close relatives whom one trusted the most. And there were gendered stories of jealousy: who got or did not get which piece of jewellery or how much gold, from whom! Gold possession and its emotionally fraught distribution are the staple of the familial bonds (and their breakdown) in India. Gold is most contentious when dowry prestations are calculated. Yet, as in my family, until the idea of this book took shape, they are so quotidian that they easily escape academic scrutiny. Gold dominates our rituals and customary exchanges and, at the same time, it functions as a quasi-currency and store of value. It constitutes the lifeblood of women's inheritance.

Through a multidisciplinary study of gold in India, this volume connects a reconnaissance of the roles of gold in familial and gendered wealth with a range of key issues in political economy. It shows how exploring the quiddity of gold offers a perfect plot to deepen our understanding of the socially regulated Indian economy.

I

The Tamil Nadu State Legal Aid Board in Madras runs a family counselling centre which is open two days a week. Estranged couples, those who desire to end their marriage or, alternatively, mend a battered relationship, approach the centre to discuss their problems, seek legal advice and voice their fears and apprehensions. The counselling takes place in a room packed with unhappy, worried faces and, often, this space acquires the character of a public tribunal, with so-called domestic matters brought within the remit of a hearing that is potentially open to all, that is, other families waiting their turn. Typically, wife and husband, and their respective kin, harangue each other, resort to pleas and accusations, upbraid counsellors (many of whom are elder citizens) for not heeding their points of view, and seek to build their arguments to a dramatic climax.

Such performances, however diverse in content and differently accentuated in their appeal, heed a certain grammar: for instance, while narrating their tales of woe, women often observe that if the gold pawned away by their husbands, without their knowledge, was redeemed; if the jewellery they brought from their natal homes was restored to them; if the precious-somany- sovereigns-worth necklace that had been pawned or sold to provide working capital for the family's petty vending be recovered, they would end the marriage honourably, without acrimony and without going to court, or strive for a reconciliation, as the case may be. Men, in their turn, insist that a part of the gold thus claimed by the women is actually theirs, earned out of their sweat and blood, their labour and, in fact, had been made over as loving gifts to ungrateful wives.