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.