Is gold a woman’s wealth, or is it just gilding the lily?
A bride’s gold works in much the same way as financial instruments like securities. It can be traded or pledged as guarantee of repayment for a loan.
A Lao wedding I attended, almost 30 years ago, was a study in contrasts. The bride, bedecked with gold, much like brides back home in India, stood outside a modest garden, holding a tray with two shot glasses. The groom beside her held a bottle of whisky (spending power determined whether this was Scotch, ordinary whiskey or lao-lao, the local hooch). Guests toasted the happy couple and went into the canopied garden to dig into communal platters of food. Dessert was literally low-hanging fruit: bunches of bananas slung on tree branches.
In the Vientiane Talat Sao, morning market, I noticed the hand-made, clunky, 24 carat gold jewellery all the women wore. One looked at my 22 carat chain disparagingly and asked me if it was brass. Much store was set by the quality and quantity of gold in a woman’s possession, somewhat at odds with the socialist ethos. Laos (officially, The Lao People’s Democratic Republic, or simply Lao PDR) is still counted among the least developed countries in the world. Yet there were things I admired: in keeping with the strong matrilineal system, it was women who controlled commerce.
Both men and women went out to work and walked or rode home on mopeds in the evening, to patriotic music blaring from loudspeakers strung up on poles along the road. My most illuminating experience, however, came from domestic help. In a house I visited, I came to know the maid, Munti, who made a wonderful fish soup. One day, taking a break from cooking and cleaning, Munti came to lounge on the sofa beside me. She looked critically at my hands and asked me where I went for a manicure. In my halting Lao I explained that I did it myself. She tossed her permed head and informed me she visited the beauty parlour once a week. This interchange pleased me in several ways, I realised I had been put in my place, for not being fashionable enough, and that tickled me. The fact that she treated me as an equal was an eye-opener. In India, even those who are kind to their domestic workers, never treat them on par with themselves.
Of course, unless you live in a country for a long time or happen to have an anthropologist’s eye, you are unlikely to see the flip side. As a visitor it was impossible for me to gauge the gap between seeming and reality. Perhaps, there too gold is a woman’s security and surely there must be those who would like to divest her of her wealth.
‘Rings on her fingers, bells on her toes, there will be money wherever she goes.’ Maid or mistress, in India, we wear our wealth. The traditional Indian bride is her own mobile bank. To give her land, property or money that she can be separated from by grasping in-laws is folly, so in a fiduciary capacity, her parents provide a sort of rainy-day fund with chains and belts, bangles and bracelets, rings and earrings of 22 carat gold. It’s called stri dhan, women’s wealth. Women who may never see the inside of a bank have the confidence to walk into a jewellery or pawn shop and exchange their rings or bangles for cash.
This gold standard is more or less applicable, depending on education, employment, social status, age and vulnerability of a woman. More or less, but it is real for virtually every woman. She may never need to sell her gold, she may even choose not to wear it, but it’s a prickling at the back of her mind — ‘if I need money, I can sell my gold.’ My friend, Anjana George remembers her grandmother in Kerala wearing all the gold she owned, every day of her life. It was never removed at bath time or bed time; it was simply part of her person. There was no question of trusting a bank locker, it was her sovereign wealth.
When I was about 20, my mother gave me a thin, short chain. It was my first gold ornament; so pretty, sparkling in the sun. Her gift touched me because of the back story from her childhood. It must have been the 1940s when she begged her mother to buy her a thin gold chain. Although the price was less than a dollar at today’s rate, my grandmother refused, for reasons of her own. The distress sale of the thin gold chain became a cautionary tale: in time of trouble, gold must be sold.
Aesthetics also play a part in purchase and vary from community to community. Typically, Anglo-Indians owned a few light, pretty pieces made of gold and that was enough. It may have been all they could afford; it may also have had something to do with women in this community being among the first to join the work force. From the early 20th century, teaching, shorthand and typing that led to secretarial jobs, and hairdressing were popular and respectable choices. Some enterprising Anglo-Indian women sold baked goods or pickles and jams from their kitchens to pull in a little extra to pad the family budget.
My great grandmother, a rich Anglo-Indian, was reputed to be a stylish dresser, matching her rubies and sapphires to her outfits and sometimes, even to the sports car she motored off in. What happened to all that fabled jewellery is anybody’s guess, probably hocked off for an idle pleasure, by her, or her offspring. Sometimes it is almost a preference to put off plans for the outcomes of old age: the death of a family provider, the greed of children, not enough money for medical treatment, and so on. End result: the gold and jewels must be traded for a different kind of assurance. Time is a sneak thief.
Trouble, the twin of time, is bolder and can’t be fussed with creeping up. Instead it explodes, in random acts of criminality. Every now and again, there are sporadic reports of chain snatchers on scooters, almost strangling women in the attempt. But more often it is the systemic abuse at the hands of violent, often alcoholic spouses that dispossesses women of the only wealth they own.
Social customs die hard and even today, the parents of the bride break the bank to arrange the big, fat Indian wedding. They take enormous loans, sometimes from banks, just as often from pawn shops and practically beggar themselves to provide the customary tamasha, for that’s what it is — a spectacle to gawk at. The prospective son-in-law is feted with fat signet rings, ropey chains, scooter or car and even a bulging briefcase of cold cash. It’s illegal (the cash), but who cares.
In one way or another, gold is imprinted in the captive imagination. From the sunken treasure of the Spanish Armada to the Klondike gold rush, it has been a mad scramble to follow the lure, no matter the cost. Indian kings and Mughal emperors were weighed against gold and diamonds in a grandiose ceremony; last performed for Aga Khan III, the leader of the Nizari Ismaili religious sect, in Bombay in 1954. Even in current times when currency is linked to trust in governments and financial institutions, any suspected failure on their part sends the price of gold rocketing. It is the universal last resort.
In some social circles an Indian woman’s worth is counted in tolas of gold (1 tola = 10 grams), the pop culture equivalent that comes closest is Marilyn Monroe’s rendition of ‘Diamonds are a girl’s best friend.’ The amount of gold that constitutes women’s wealth still beggars the imagination. In an interesting reversal, my young friend’s American wife, Jackie received so many ornaments from her kindly in-laws, she said in some astonishment, “So much gold!” That’s the way the murukku crumbles in our part of the world, Jackie.