India has held a glowing if strange position in the history of humans and gold.

For centuries, legends were told of how this land contained so much of the precious metal, ants dug it up as dust. When the first European traders arrived, they found, of course, that the real treasures were the spices, mainly black pepper and cinnamon.

It is easy to understand the craze that ensued, when one thinks of what ancient European cuisine must have been like without pepper. Amid soaring demand, then, gold began to flow into India.

By the 1st century CE, the philosopher and military commander Pliny the Elder was complaining that India was becoming “the sink of the world’s precious metals”.

In addition to spices, merchants in India’s coastal cities were raking it in from the sale of ivory, pearls, gems, aromatic nard (an oil used in perfumes), teak, textiles, even wild animals such as tigers and panthers used in public entertainments and executions.

“We are only just beginning to realise how much Roman gold ended up in Indian pockets,” says historian William Dalrymple. His book The Golden Road, released this week by Bloomsbury, shows a map of India covered in Roman coin hordes, per an Oxford survey.

There was an actual worry in Rome that they were going to run out of the precious metal, Dalrymple says. “The trade then was in hyper-luxuries, the equivalent of Gucci bags today, and Pliny couldn’t understand why Romans were paying so much for transparent silk or for a pungent taste in their food because of pepper!”

In the coastal cities of present-day Kerala and Tamil Nadu, where much of the sea trade was concentrated, merchants began crafting the gold they saved up into jewellery for their wives and daughters. It was the easiest way to safeguard these assets. And so it became fashionable to wear kasumala — chains made up of overlapping decorative coins, often featuring the face of a deity associated with prosperity.

Kasumala are still an essential part of wedding trousseaus in both states.

“The aspiration and desire for gold jewellery in Kerala, and later in Bengal, is comparable with that of gemstones such as emeralds and diamonds in Punjab and Rajasthan,” says jewellery historian Usha Balakrishnan.

Gemstones, however, were complicated. Some were said to be inauspicious; others, cursed. It was said that a stone taken from the earth unbidden could cause generations of a family immense hardship.

Gold was universally a blessing to have, across India, Dalrymple points out. It was ritually pure, could be easily moulded. It was rare enough to be hoarded and treasured. “That sentiment has continued into the modern era.”

An element of surprise

India continues to import most of its gold; native deposits are relatively low. In the financial year 2023-24, for instance, the union ministry of mines reports that India produced only about 1.5 tonnes.

But our love for the metal has led to it being collected, hoarded, traded and turned to in times of need. Gold played an integral part in the Independence movement, forming the seed capital that fuelled it, as women offered their ornaments up, to be melted, sold and otherwise used to raise funds and keep the freedom struggle going.

“Many Indian businesses and business empires have been bootstrapped by gold, which became a mandatory part of every household safe as our GDP grew,” says Ramya Ramamurthy, a business journalist who co-hosts the podcast Remembering It Differently (with HT’s Rachel Lopez).

India currently ranks eighth globally, on the list of countries with the most gold in their central bank reserves, according to the World Gold Council. (The US, Germany and Italy occupy the top spots; our nearest subcontinental neighbour on the list is Pakistan, at #33.)

India also ranks fourth on the list of world’s biggest gold recyclers. “Over the past five years 11% of India’s gold supply has come from ‘old gold’; driven by movements in the gold price, future gold price expectations and the wider economic outlook,” a 2022 World Gold Council report states. (China, incidentally, tops this list.)

“For Indians, gold has traditionally been the flight to safety, the inflation hedge, the asset least likely to be affected by recession and most likely to rise in value in times of trouble,” says Bazil Shaikh, former principal chief general manager with the Reserve Bank of India and author of The Conjuror’s Trick: An Interpretive History of Paper Money in India (2020).

How hardy an investment is it? In 1947, gold cost ₹88 for 10 gm. Today, 10 gm is worth a little more than ₹70,000.

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