For Many South Asian Women, Gold Jewellery Is A Gateway To Security

Writer Sadiya Ansari spent six years investigating a period in which her paternal grandmother left her seven children in Karachi, Pakistan, to move 1,000 kilometres away to a tiny town her second husband lived in. She returned to the family 15 years later, not seeing Ansari’s father—her son—for 18 years, but ended up living with Ansari’s family in Markham, Ont., for the last decade of her her life. “As a child I knew nothing about this period in our family’s history until a chatty aunt told me at a party when I was an adolescent,” writes Ansari. “As I entered my 30s, I started to reflect more deeply on what it meant for her to be married at 14 and widowed by 34. In my exploration of wifedom and motherhood meant for her, and for me as someone with interest in neither, I discovered one cultural tool designed to provide women agency in an era where they had little—gold. And this precious metal held another superpower for me: revealing my mother’s role as the connective tissue between my generation and Daadi’s.” Below, an excerpt from Ansari’s book, In Exile: Rapture, Reunion, and My Grandmother’s Secret Life.

While marriage is the ultimate gateway to security in my culture, for centuries there has been one other thing South Asian women could fall back on: gold. 

I was introduced to the joy of wearing a set made just for me as a 14-year-old. The choker, jhumke and ring used a motif of small gold coins, with a yellow-flecked star stone at the centre of each medallion. The jewellery accompanied a rust-coloured gharara, and wearing it all together felt like an initiation into womanhood. 

Marriage and gold are inextricably linked across South Asian cultures and religions—it can act as both a dowry and financial security for a young wife. Your marital status also determines how much gold you can wear. Younger, unmarried women typically wear lighter chains, mirroring what widows wear on the other side of marriage. 

While I’ve never been married, at 38, I’ve pushed past the “young” category. So what happens to the gold set aside for you if you don’t get married? Comparing my experience with my sister’s, the same thing: your mother holds all your jewellery for you in her bank locker. 

Cultural norms dictate that you don’t actually have to get married to inherit gold. A daughter has rights over her mother’s jewellery, although a wedding marks an occasion where new sets are created for you. 

While visiting my parents in the outskirts of Toronto from Berlin two years ago, I was itching to excavate some gold I assumed I could own to find a piece I could actually wear. The bright gold that used to embarrass me as a teen was something I increasingly longed to wear on my wrists, around my neck. 

On a crisp fall morning, my dad and I were planning to go to the mall, where the bank was. (My dad is a devoted mall walker, walking three kilometres a day for the last 30 years, rain or shine, arthritic flares or not.) Ammi put my name on her bank locker a few years earlier, wanting someone else to have access to it in case something happened to her. But she surprised me by refusing to let me see the jewellery without her present. 

My father also surprised me that same morning, when he told me that he’d never had access to the locker, and he hadn’t even seen its contents. 

***

What was in the locker was the domain of women—emeralds, rubies, pearls, diamonds and, of course, gold. It is one of the few financial domains my mom alone could make decisions in, despite her being the savvier investor of my parents. A headline in the Indian Times declared that in 2020, Indian women owned 11 percent of gold worldwide. This didn’t surprise me in the least. The figure itself is hard to verify, but it’s widely understood that the “demand and hoarding” of gold is a pan-Indian phenomenon that is “unparalleled,” as anthropologist Nilika Mehrortra writes. 

Gold holds many meanings—it symbolizes prosperity, feminine beauty, fertility—but the most important is social security for a woman. It is “the most acceptable and legitimate form of property women possess in the patriarchal set up.” 

In conversation with Mehrorta, she explained to me that a patrilineal inheritance structure meant men inherited land and women inherited gold. It was assumed women would get married, so they weren’t given immoveable property—gold is easy to transport and is seen to be as liquid as cash. 

Not only is gold given to women as inheritance, and gifted especially during weddings, it’s seen as a good investment. Everyone—from women like my mother returning to Pakistan every few years, to women from fishing villages in southern India with little expendable income—will save to invest in gold. 

Before bank lockers were accessible to the middle class, people would hide gold at home, digging holes underneath the stove. Historically, gold saved families during hard times. Mehrorta has seen this in her own family’s history. After her grandmother moved from Lahore to the Indian part of Punjab following Partition, jewellery was the only asset she had left. She sold it all, save for a pair of earrings and a ring, to set up a new life. 

Mehrorta herself refused the gold her mother wanted to give her on her wedding day, telling her mother she was a feminist and didn’t believe in a dowry. But after spending some time studying the significance of the fine metal, she realized the importance of handing it down. Not passing it on was like disinheriting your daughter. 

***

Two weeks after my initial attempt to survey my zaiver situation, my mother took me to the bank herself. The teller was a brown woman in her 20s, with long black waves and a yellow-gold necklace hanging around her neck, a telltale sign she knew exactly what kind of booty was in the long, narrow box she retrieved for us. We went into one of the two rooms reserved for this task, tiny with a desk and chair, with cobalt blue walls and a lock on the door. Ammi had meticulously organized what was mine, my sister’s and hers, and what she planned to pass down to her nieces and their children. 

Ammi showed me a gold ring her mother had given my father and told me I could have it to remake into whatever I’d like. My Naani had also given my father a gold watch, one my sister had copped a decade earlier that I was still incredibly envious about. 

There were many other pieces Naani gave my mother, some which Ammi had already put aside for me. But the most meaningful gift was the one she gave Ammi before my mother headed to the airport to start a new life in Canada: three gold coins. 

The difference between gold coins and other coins is that the actual gold is what’s valuable about the coin—modern coins are about 92 percent gold. Countries produce their own versions, and while an American Eagle one-ounce gold coin has a denomination of $50, it’s actually worth 40 times that based on the weight of the gold. While gold bars are usually part of a bank’s gold reserve, coins can make it into the mix, and if you take a gold coin to a bank, you can walk out with cash. 

Naani knew all of this when she passed the coins into her daughter’s hands and said: “Beta, dekho wahan takleef nahin uthana.” She told her daughter if things became difficult, she could take these coins to a bank, cash them, buy a plane ticket and come home. It was the least Naani could do to assuage her daughter’s fears. After all, when my mother boarded her flight from Karachi to New York, she hadn’t even met her husband yet. 

“It was so painful, Sadiya,” Ammi told me as she recalled the memory. Her voice was low but steady, then she paused and repeated herself in an even quieter voice: “It was so painful.” 

***

During Ramzan in 1977, my parents’ marriage was arranged. 

Ammi discovered her marriage had been arranged by overhearing her family speaking about her wedding with one another, while my father found out via telegram.  

The ceremony was performed over the phone, and while my father was supposed to arrive in Pakistan for the ruksathi to bring my mother back to Canada, it didn’t work out that way. So Ammi prepared herself to get on a plane. 

After Naani gave my mother the gold coins, she refused to go to the airport with the rest of the family. She finally relented under one condition, turning to her daughter to extract a promise: “You will not cry at the airport.” 

Ammi nodded, miraculously keeping her promise as she held each sibling close, saying goodbye. But as soon as she exited the doors past security, she broke down. 

On the insufferably long plane ride from Karachi to New York, she cried quietly, but a flight attendant noticed and kept checking in. As the plane nearly reached the unknown continent she’d soon call home, Ammi changed into a shalwar suit her mother had ironed and placed carefully in a garment bag so her daughter could make a sharp first impression. It had some light embroidery, signalling that her tears weren’t prompted by a death but an event normally considered a celebration. 

When the flight attendant spotted her outfit change, she asked Ammi if she just got married. She nodded, and the attendant asked if she could do Ammi’s makeup. She sat beside my mother, carefully running a mascara brush over her lashes, livening her cheeks with blush. 

*** 

When I moved to Berlin, my mom told me she wished she had the opportunity to do what I did: explore by choice. I was exasperated by this response. It made me feel immensely guilty for all the opportunities she didn’t have. I wanted her to just be happy for me, and I didn’t realize then it was perhaps the highest compliment she could have given me, naming her own desire and commending me for accomplishing it. 

I later asked Ammi if she ever thought about using the coins. She immediately said no. There was something about her mother’s rare instance of softness in handing those coins to her that made her even more determined to make it work. 

I sometimes wonder what 24-year-old Shahnaz would have done if she had been given gold to make her own way rather than as an emergency fund. What she would have done if she had the kind of freedom I have—before she became a wife, before she became my mother. I think of her in my favourite photo of her from early in her marriage: long hair cascading over a salt-and-pepper wool coat tied at the waist, her hands in her pockets, wearing slouchy calf-high black boots while looking out into the horizon. 

Excerpted with permission from In Exile: Rapture, Reunion, and My Grandmother’s Secret Life by Sadiya Ansari, 2024 House of Anansi Press. 

In Exile was one of our favourite books of fall 2024. Find more great new releases.