For Indian Women, Gold Isn't Just Tradition; It’s Survival

In India, gold can buy you enterprises, real estate, stocks, and bonds but not freedom. It sits in lockers, is worn as ornament, passed between generations, and invoked during moments of crisis. Yet behind the shimmer lies one of the most gendered financial systems in the world.

It is estimated that Indian housewives possess nearly 11% of the world’s entire gold reserves.

While financing medical emergencies, school education, and keeping small businesses afloat, might make it seem empowering, these assets function more like tools of control and survival embedded in patriarchal structures of dowry, marital negotiations, and social surveillance, where ownership does not always equate to autonomy.

The Economics of Weddings

Most gold is held in the form of jewellery since it is something that society can allow women to claim as theirs, even if conditionally. Its significance in the lives of Indian women is best understood through its cultural logic that privileges portability, visibility, and continuity over abstract financial returns.

Worn on the body rather than stored in documents, gold functions as mobile wealth in a context where women’s access to land, bank accounts, and legal assets has historically been limited or insecure.

Its visibility is not merely decorative but communicative, signalling family status, marital security, and social legitimacy across regions and classes, from the heavy bridal sets of southern India to lighter, daily-wear pieces among urban and working-class women. 

Weddings act as the primary engine of this gold accumulation, concentrating decades of family savings into strategic transfers of wealth, allowing women to have a bargaining chip in their households and marriages.

Often sent with daughters as a form of dowry expectation or a symbol of family honour, it is also the unspoken but promising cushion in case of a divorce, or abusive households.

Yet, the ownership is a constant site of negotiation as the husband and the family assume collective control and custody, fighting for decisions regarding selling or holding it.

These negotiations, coupled with the fact that several of these gold owning women lack financial or legal literacy, prisons these assets in a space of social, cultural and emotional value that women cannot independently access.

Over time, this wedding gold becomes the backbone of intergenerational transfer, moving from mothers to daughters as emotional and financial inheritance in lieu of property. In doing so, gold creates a matrilineal thread of value that sustains women across life stages, even as it remains entangled in social pressure.

Gold thus endures not simply because of tradition, but because it continues to solve structural problems that modern financial systems have yet to address for Indian women.

Furthermore, gold loans are preferred over banks because they bypass credit histories, guarantors, and prolonged approval processes. Women navigate both informal pawn shops and formal non-banking financial companies (NBFCs), weighing speed and discretion against interest rates and regulatory protection.

The transaction is quick, collateral-based, and often free from the moral scrutiny that accompanies other forms of borrowing. Women are seen as “safe” borrowers since they seem risk-averse, more repayment-conscious, and emotionally invested in reclaiming pledged jewellery. 

In this ecosystem, gold becomes a gendered bridge between vulnerability and liquidity, converting household-held wealth into survival capital without requiring women to step fully into a financial system that has historically excluded them. 

Thus gold becomes both economically and culturally encoded. It enables women to access credit when formal finance excludes them and promises insurance in emergencies.

However, it still fails to translate into autonomy. The paradox of gold is at the heart of India’s most feminised asset, one that is deeply empowering, quietly restrictive, and central to the economics of womanhood.

Views expressed by the author are their own.