At Talk on ‘Gold in India: Commodity, Communities, and Economic Circuits’ by Professor Anindita Chakrabarti

About the talk

India, one of the largest importers of gold in the world, has the reputation of being an insatiable market for the yellow metal. Gold policies since Independence has failed to curb and control the country’s gold demand, a major cause of foreign exchange deficit. Gold enjoys a double life as a sacramental object as well as the most fungible financial investment option. Its ubiquity in banks, temples, and wedding ceremonies offers interesting material to think through sociological theories of consumption, wealth accumulation, and kinship. Both gold jewellery manufacturing and gold trade have been community-based occupations in India. Even when the traditional boundaries of caste-based occupations have weakened in recent times, they have retained their community character. The lecture tracks and traces the changes in the gold sector in the post-Independence period that was precipitated by a series of new laws to control gold consumption. The command economy led to what is known as ‘license raj’ and resulted in a complete overhaul of goldsmithing as a caste-based activity and buried it in the informal sector. An ever-growing shadow economy was the unintended consequence of the of acts brought in during this period. Trust, village networks and being self-organized (not unorganized) have been the hallmark of the goldsmithery sector since then. Finally, the talk aims to ask and answer the question: what does gold consumption mean in India (and elsewhere) where modernization has failed to dent the sacramental, sartorial as well as financial supremacy of the ‘barbarous relic’ and the precious commodity continues to inhabit different economic circuits in its many avatars?

About the speaker

Anindita Chakrabarti, Professor of Sociology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences IIT Kanpur, teaches and researches in the areas of sociology of religion, religion-based family law, and economic sociology with a focus on inheritance, entrepreneurship and family business. In 2010, she won the M.N. Srinivas Memorial Award conferred by the Indian Sociological Association. Her monograph titled Faith and Social Movements: Religious Reform in Contemporary India (Cambridge University Press) was published in 2018 and co-edited volume titled Religion and Secularities: Reconfiguring Islam in Contemporary India (Orient Blackswan) in 2020. She has published several peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters and has held visiting fellowships at the Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies at Leipzig University (2016-2024) and at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology at Halle (2022), Max Planck Institute for the Study of Society at Cologne (2022), the India Gold Policy Centre at IIM Ahmedabad (2023-24), and at the Cluster of Excellence Religion and Politics at the University of Munster (2024). Her forthcoming co-edited book Gold in India: Commodity, Communities, and Economic Circuits will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2025.

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