Gold’s Own Country

IN 2017, SCIENTISTS closely studied a rare phenomenon that they believed had finally cracked one of the most enduring mysteries on Earth: the origin of element No 79 on the Periodic Table: Au or Gold. Designed in 1869 by Russian chemist Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleev, the Periodic Table classifies all chemical elements according to their atomic number and chemical properties. Gold has been intertwined with most of human history; it has witnessed ancient civilisations fall and new ones rise, funded wars, triggered widespread ecological destruction in its search; and it has been treasured for its exchange value, cultural significance, religious symbolism and lustrous beauty—that is, for its incredible status. The Incas believed gold was the tears of the sun god and the Egyptians associated it with the god Ra and gilded their dead rich, pharaohs and nobles, in gold to symbolise immortality. For Homer, in the Iliad and the Odyssey, gold was wealth for humans and the sign of the immortals.

In the middle of the 6th century BCE, King Croesus of Lydia minted the world’s first gold coin. Known as a stater or Croeseid, this coin marked a key turning point in the history of financial systems. This was the beginning of the gold standard. But the first gold bank came only in 13th-century Europe, when explorers and long-distance travellers would deposit their gold in the banks before setting off on their journey. This was used to both raise finances against the gold for the trip and as insurance against any disaster. In India, gold has been linked with the goddess of prosperity and good fortune, Laxmi. But the mystery of how gold, among the rarest of elements on Earth, actually formed remained unsolved.

The 2017 study observed and interpreted the scientific data from a Supernova II event, a high-velocity collision and merger of two neutron stars. This ‘Killer Nova’ (Kilonova) event reportedly engendered cataclysmic energy that released heavy metals and rare elements, scattering gold and platinum in a massive cloud. The Earth’s core, made of molten iron, is believed to have dragged this down into its bowel and around 80-100 per cent of all the gold on the planet is believed to have been manufactured in that cosmic event, through neutron star merger and collision. There are videos of scientists pointing to a gold wrist watch and saying, “This came from the stars.” However, the rarity of the ‘Killer Nova’ event meant they were able to study only one other such occur­rence which, unfortunately, did not release heavy metals and rare elements despite a violent collision and failed to corroborate the theory that every such event followed the same pattern. Either the scientists were extremely lucky in 2017 or have been unlucky since. They were left to conclude that such events were much more frequent earlier. It was back to the drawing board.

Despite the immense mystery enveloping its origins, gold has continued to dominate cultures, civilisations, politics, civil wars, inva­sions, society, trade, economics, fash­ion and art, and refined tastes, includ­ing, ironically, culinary tastes where it was exchanged with the rulers of Malabar for black gold, or pepper. Pep­per, in ancient times, was weighed in gold. Blood, gore, violence, death and destruction, mafia wars, child labour have all been written into its trajectory as much as refinement and culture. More recently, the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) was run for years through illegal and exploitative labour for the production of minerals, including gold, sent to the West. The violence continues even today and the DRC remains marred by poverty despite the gold mines and blames Rwanda for the violence by the M23 militia. Several media investigations have attested, meanwhile, that illegally mined gold, using rudimen­tary methods, in the pristine Amazon forests of Peru makes its way to the world’s topmost refining companies in Switzerland that claim, through slick advertisement campaigns similar to that of De Beers, that they reject all such sourcing of gold despite documentary proof to the contrary.

The amount of gold available today on Earth could be used to coat the entire surface of the planet 13 inches thick, thanks not to how much of it is available but mainly how malleable and ductile the shining metal, impervious to any corrosion, is. In truth, if all of the above-ground gold were stacked together, the resulting cube would only measure 22 metres on each side. That is how rare gold is on the planet. In the rough, gold is said to be almost like soft putty. The World Gold Council estimates that miners have historically extracted a total of 201,296 tonnes of gold, leaving another 53,000 tonnes in identified underground re­serves. Down to the numbers, it no longer sounds like a lot of it is available although it remains the most expensive metal com­pared to silver, platinum and copper. On April 20, for instance, the price of 22-carat gold in India was ₹89,600 per 10 grams and 24-carat gold, the purest form of the metal, ₹97,730. With GST, gold hit ₹1 lakh for 10g on Monday, April 21.

Close to half of all the gold mined through history is jewellery, with India and China emerging over time as the world’s biggest consumers of crafted gold. In 2020, the two countries accounted for more than 50 per cent of the global demand for jewellery. His­torically, India has been the biggest gold consumer and China has topped the list only in recent years. By its very nature, the shiny and rare element has nurtured several contradictions, just as it does with the growth of civilisation and the ruin of societies. In his study of gold’s relationship with the subcontinent, and especially Kerala and the Malabar Coast, George Varghese K points out that although India’s hunger for gold is legendary, its share in global production through history was a meagre 1 per cent. But the gold accumulated in this sink was more than 30,000 tonnes, almost one-sixth of the world total.

Citing historian Fernand Braudel, Varghese points out that the movement of this metal determined history. But all through that history, gold globally moved towards Asia, not away from it. Gold expert Peter Bernstein maintains that Asia is the sink of gold and once it entered this sink it never escaped. With­in Asia, India was the preferred point of accumulation, according to metallur­gists specialising in gold studies. From the studies of experts such as Braudel, Frank Perlin and Andre Gunder Frank, it was clear that gold and silver moved in opposite directions within India; gold moved southwards while silver moved northwards. And in the peninsular south, it was the Malabar Coast that wrote for itself an inextricably close relationship with the metal. Much of that was rooted in the other precious commodity for centuries, black gold, or pepper. Traders from all over followed the monsoons to the coast of Kerala to buy its pepper which the Romans, for instance, used in culinary and medicinal recipes, even warming wine with black pepper, and as a symbol of good taste. The Roman Empire traded gold with Indian rulers on the west coast in exchange of substantial amounts of spices, including pepper. Rome’s epicurean leanings enriched subcontinental rulers with gold in lieu of spices, textiles and precious stones such as diamonds, pearls and emeralds. Trade between India and Persia, including both the Achaemenid and later Sasanian Empires, played a crucial role in the economic prosperity of both regions. This trade was facilitated by the overland routes that connected the subcontinent with Persia.

India’s strategic position straddling the Indian Ocean, the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea meant traders made its coast a regular port of call. By land, too, the so-called Silk Road not just facilitated the exchange of gold for other commodities but also the spread of philosophical and religious ideas. The overland road to Persia meant that there were steady trading partners who en­riched India with gold in exchange of other commodities. In May 1498, Vasco da Gama landed on the scenic Kappad Beach, located in Kozhikode district of Kerala. This marked the beginning of Portuguese influence on the west coast and European trade with India. Da Gama apparently asked the Zamorin of Calicut if he could take a pepper plant back with him to plant in his homeland, whereupon the Zamorin replied, “You may take the pepper plant but you will never be able to take our monsoon rains.” The Portu­guese apparently followed the routes of the Arab merchants who sailed with a tailwind towards the Kerala coast during Mausam or the right weather (later transformed in English to Monsoon), a rainy season brought on by favourable winds that travelled to India’s west coast from Oman.

That gold connection goes back to Harappa and Mohenjo- Daro, where artefacts unearthed from the Indus Valley period signal the extensive use of gold jewellery. Gold beads, buttons, nuggets, head ornaments, amulets, bracelets, necklaces, rings, etc have all emerged from the excavations. Apart from the Ganga, the Brahmaputra, Indus and Damodar rivers, the Swarnarekha in Karnataka was also known for its gold deposits. Historical records suggest that gold panning was a widespread activity along its banks, contributing to local economies. Historians and archaeologists contend that Kushan Emperor Vima Kadphises introduced the first standardised gold coins in the subcontinent in approximately 100CE. That coinage system, with its weight standards, laid the foundation for the Gupta Empire when coins were Indianised in terms of style and design.

THE TREASURE TROVES of gold that came to the sub­continent through trade, besides what was panned along river banks in the north, west and south, meant that gold ornaments were crafted with finesse by artisans and craftsmen who created exquisite jewellery not only for the gods—religious purposes and temple use—but also for royalty and nobility, many being exclusively retained and patronised by them for generations. Since gold was associated with divinity, prosperity and wealth, a substantial amount of the non-corrosive metal was dedicated to the gods by kings, nobles and landlords. Dedicated temples with special deities decked with an abundance of gold adornments showcased the prosperity of various kingdoms. Gold reserves in Indian temples today are estimated at around 20,000 tonnes, far exceeding the annual global supply of an estimated 4,500 tonnes.

The Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Thiruvananthapuram is famous for its hidden riches. In 2011, the opening of its secret vaults revealed treasures estimated at ₹ 1,20,000 crore, making it the richest temple not just in India but also in the world. These treasures include vast amounts of gold, jewellery, coins and pre­cious stones, stored securely in multiple vaults, some of which still need to be opened due to traditional beliefs and myths sur­rounding them. Historians trace the origins of temple jewellery to the 9th-century Chola kingdom. Highly skilled artisans were employed in both Tamil Nadu and Kerala where such jewellery is known as thiruvabharanam. Once gold was donated for jew­ellery to the gods, they would be crafted by a few pattans (gold­smiths) and asaris (jewellers), such as those of Vadasseri, a place at the southern tip of Tamil Nadu bordering Kerala. Thus, temple jewellery is also known as Vadassery (or Vadasari) or Kemp. It in­cluded earrings, necklaces, wristlets, bracelets, armlets, waistlets, headgear, masks, tali (mangalsutra), and kasinara (chain of coins). Classical danc­ers further popularised the traditional jewellery, including gem stone-studded jewellery associated with specific dei­ties and harmonious living. The crafts­manship, as with the Vishwakarma craftsmen in Kerala who made jewel­lery for personal use, would be passed down through generations.

Modern-day Kerala, as with neigh­bouring Tamil Nadu, is still obsessed with gold jewellery and the two states top the list of gold and gold jewellery consumption. The biggest holding of gold is in Tamil Nadu followed by Kerala. Today, all main arteries in big cities and small towns are plastered with huge hoardings of new manufac­turers in the gold industry. With a huge cultural demand on every occasion, ranging from birth to puberty to marriage to child birth, renewal of vows as senior citizens and, finally, death, Kerala has over 7,000 shops in a land occupied by three crore people. Fifty of these are big brands like Kalyan Jewellers, Joyalukkas, Malabar Gold and Diamonds, Bhima Jewellers, and Josco Jewellers. Some 200 tonnes of gold is traded every year as of now. According to Varghese, the small state of Kerala handled as much as 175 tonnes of gold annually in 2001, 40 per cent of what the US imported that year at around 413 tonnes. NRIs from the Gulf nations were the main route for incom­ing gold, followed by gold smuggled in through other destinations like Mumbai, Rajkot, etc. Big companies, too, smuggled in gold. The fourth route was that of gold bought from places like Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and so on.

Varghese’s study on gold and its relation to Kerala (Skewed Trajectories: Gold and Globalisation in Kerala), contends that while gold consumption and sale continue to be key contributors to the state’s revenue, alcohol consumption has emerged as a new contender for this distinction. Even more interesting is the observation that the two sectors are gender exclusive. In Kerala, men are rarely seen in jewellery showrooms except when tending to children or do­ing some such onerous chore, while women are rarely seen in bars. He nar­rates the story of a woman beaten up at an alcohol outlet although it turned out she was buying the booze for her alcoholic husband.

Most of the swanky new jewel­lery showrooms rely on machines for making the jewellery as opposed to engaging traditional craftsmen who worked by hand. Modern de­signs have been incorporated and the preference, more often, is not just for pure 24-carat gold but also work wear jewellery of lesser purity but captivating designs. Varghese observes, “How could, in the near-total absence of a particular com­modity, it be so obsessively desired? This is in total contradiction with the materialist-dialectical theory which presupposes the presence of an object in an appreciable quantity to have any effect.” The clues lie in the fact that, in the economic history of the world, Kerala has gained significance in relation to gold. Perhaps the genetic myth of Hiranyagarbha, the womb of gold, is true of Kerala more than any other region of the country.

In Kerala, the productivity of land was once measured in gold. Gold coins from ancient Kerala, called Rasi, were among the smallest of the kind in the world. Proof of imperial power rested on the right to mint gold coins. Other than the Roman emperor, the only royal head to mint gold coins anywhere in the world as recorded by Alexander del Mar, the American economic histo­rian, was the Zamorin of Calicut. For centuries, he says, the right was vested with the emperors. From Julius Caesar to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, there were only two Roman gold coins in the Western world: the early aureus of Constantine and the solidus which was the ‘dollar’ of the Roman world.

All the gold ever extracted—most of it since 1950 when new technology emerged—still exists in one form or another, includ­ing gold foil, teeth fillings, in medicines etc, since gold is indestruc­tible. It held the power, however, to destroy whole societies, king­doms and civilisations. Nowhere was this better demonstrated in India than in the plight of the skilled traditional craftsmen. In his study ‘Under the Curse of Gold: Kerala’s Gold Boom and the Exit of Vishwakarma Goldsmiths’, Varghese maintains that even when the public obsession with gold is in your face everywhere in the state, even when people are buying much more gold than ever and merchants are raking in huge profits, the traditional gold­smiths from the Vishwakarma community have been pushed towards poverty, suicide and near-extinction.

Although a 2014 study in Thris­sur, the biggest gold jewellery manufacturing hub in Kerala, con­cluded that Vishwakarma crafts­men still dominated the sector, their actual numbers had come down drastically, giving way to workers (not exactly skilled craftsmen) from a host of other states and communities. “Gold, its material and metallurgical complexities over determine the present predica­ment of Vishwakarma goldsmiths to a great extent,” he observed. The fault lies in the very properties of the metal that elevated the traditional craftsmen to high position until the 1980s, from when they were socially and economically sidelined. Gold is an incredibly malleable and ductile element at all temperatures. To put this in perspective, a thread drawn from a single tonne of gold can stretch from the Earth to the moon and back. In ancient Egypt, craftsmen could beat gold bullion to such fine thinness that it took 250,000 sheets to make a layer just one inch thick. How then did the metallurgical properties of gold, a thing that the goldsmith is acutely aware of and works with, force the Vishwa­karma craftsmen from an elevated perch in society to the category of fraudsters and thieves? It is thanks to how incredibly malleable and ductile gold is; it has the ability to gild or coat any other element seamlessly and make it appear just like pure gold. So, while this most expensive of metals can coat and make cheaper metals like silver, platinum and copper highly expensive, it is also the cheapest metal to coat other less attractive metals. In effect, in faking the gold-ness of other elements, gold also fakes itself. Unlike other artisans and craftsmen, traditional goldsmiths were not paid by the hour or a salary for their exquisite, handmade jewellery. Instead, they were paid by the ornament and the work detail ordered. Since this was often quite meagre a sum for the hours of work and effort, traditional craftsmen relied to an extent on the gold dust or wastage material which could then be swept, gathered and melted anew into minuscule nuggets. For working on a sovereign of eight grams, for instance, the wastage was 200 milligrams. The wastage was more expensive than the charges for craftsmanship.

The practice itself worked somewhat akin to the measured cloth supplied to a tailor for dress where the extra material was cut up and became waste. In the goldsmith’s case, though, since practically every customer gave just the right amount of gold for the ornament, with little extra to work with on estimated mea­surements rather than exact dimensions, he usually waited and used the minuscule extra needed from the material supplied by the next customer, and then the next, and so on. In every case, this meant delaying delivery until additional gold material could be accessed from the next customer since the craftsman could not afford gold on his own. But this meant also that gold of different purities was mixed at times and the goldsmith was caught out by angry customers. In some rare cases, gold­smiths resorted to gold-gilding or gold-plating a cheaper metal like silver so they could meet the cus­tomer’s demand on time, often for an auspiciously scheduled wed­ding or christening, etc. Some succumbed to the temptation of faking an ornament with a lot of skill in order to cover personal expenses for family emergencies. This led to universally disparag­ing perceptions of the traditional goldsmiths. The very proper­ties of the gold they specialised in for generations had begun to ensnare traditional craftsmen in a perceived mould of fraudster and cheat. While earlier they would work in the homes of rich customers, that was a privilege no longer accorded to them for a variety of reasons and they had little choice but to work from home, if work was even available, with the intervention of shop owners to placate irate customers. This led to their working at the shops with other workers who were mostly not skilled but were cutters, welders and wire pullers. With the gradual advent of machines and modern, if not as intricate, designs in jewellery, big merchants and jewellery companies employed cheaper cookie-cutter workmen from other communities, lured customers with promises of substan­tially reduced or nil making charges. All of this began ringing the death knell for the skilled, traditional goldsmith.

But it was the Gold Control Act, passed by the government in 1963 and revoked only in 1990, which delivered the body blow. It was meant to control foreign exchange outflow in the aftermath of the 1962 India- China war and banned public use of 22-carat gold. Yet the public failed to surrender its gold to the government and, worst of all, it destroyed the fundamentals of the traditional goldsmith’s livelihood, allowing transactions only in 14 carat gold and below. Between 1963 and 1966, an estimated 260 goldsmiths committed suicide. Under public pressure, the government sub­sequently revoked the status of 22-carat gold but stopped work on new gold, allowing work only on old or melted old gold. It also changed the status of goldsmithery to an industry, despite the craftsmen being neither manufacturers nor labourers. Caught in the middle, being neither a gold merchant nor a shop owner, the traditional artisans were edged out. As certified goldsmiths, they could not work in shops anymore and many moved back to their villages where they found little work because of the per­sistent image of being fraudsters. Many of the next generation moved to other professions, gradually imperilling the existence of traditional goldsmithery.

The nub of the problem is that, as Varghese puts it, “the real villain, gold, escapes; only to territorialize itself in a new hub and to begin its historic journey towards destruction, which started with early history.”

admanabhaswamy Templeglobal gold productionGold investmentGold pricesKeralaSouth India