Gold in Bharat is not merely stored wealth. It is remembered light. It is faith that has learned to endure time. Across millennia of upheaval, invasions, and colonial extraction, one fact stands undisturbed. Bharat remains the greatest holder of gold on earth, not by accident, but by civilizational design.
Official estimates from western corporates like Morgan Stanley suggest Bharatiya households hold around 30,000 tonnes of gold. Temples officially account for another 4,000 tonnes, while the government holds approximately 1,000 tonnes. Beyond these figures lies an unmeasured reservoir embedded in inherited jewellery, undocumented temple vaults, and private collections passed silently across generations. At a gold price of $4,500 per ounce, just these 35,000 tonnes represent well over $5.6 trillion in value. No other civilization has accumulated, retained, and culturally protected such an amount over such an uninterrupted span of history.
The Golden Thread of Antiquity
Long before modern economics, ancient observers struggled to explain Bharat’s magnetism for gold. Their accounts read not as exaggeration, but as repeated astonishment.
Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, noted that Indians gathered gold dust from river sands. Megasthenes, the Greek ambassador to the Mauryan court, recorded that gold was abundant and widely used, even adorning animals. Strabo described India as a land overflowing with gold and precious stones. Diodorus Siculus observed that gold in India was treated as sacred rather than decorative. Pliny the Elder lamented that Rome’s gold and silver flowed relentlessly eastward, never to return.
Taken together, these testimonies reveal a pattern. Gold did not merely pass through Bharat. It stayed. It was absorbed into society because it was not treated as excess, but as essence.
Gold in Scripture and Spirit
The foundations of this relationship lie deep within Hindu Dharma. The Vedas refer to gold as hiraṇya, the colour of truth and divine brilliance. The Hiranyagarbha hymn speaks of creation emerging from a golden womb, establishing gold as a substance of origin itself. In this worldview, gold is not inert matter. It is condensed purity.
Lakṣmī rests upon a golden lotus as the embodiment of auspicious abundance. Śrī Hari is described as radiant like molten gold, symbolizing preservation and balance. Temples across Bharat accepted gold not as accumulation, but as offering. Chola era sanctums were layered in gold leaf. The spires of Kashi Vishwanath and Jagannath Puri still receive gold as devotion transformed into permanence.
In Hindu Dharma, gold is not worshipped, but it is never profaned.
The Age of Invasions
Documented large scale breach into Bharat’s accumulated wealth begins in 711 CE, with Muhammad bin Qasim’s invasion of Sindh under the Umayyad Caliphate. Contemporary Arab chronicles such as the Chachnama describe the seizure of vast quantities of gold, silver, and jewels from temples and treasuries in Debal and Multan. Multan itself was referred to by Arab writers as the City of Gold due to its famed Sun Temple, whose treasury reportedly financed further campaigns westward.
What followed was not a single episode, but a recurring historical pattern. Between the eighth and eighteenth centuries, Bharat was repeatedly invaded by powers for whom its gold was incidental to their attempts to spread their foreign religious barbarism.
Mahmud of Ghazni’s 17 recorded raids between 1000 and 1027 CE were explicitly economic in intent. Persian chronicler Al Utbi, in Tarikh al Yamini, records that Mahmud’s sack of Somnath alone yielded wealth so immense that the quantity of gold and jewels taken exceeded all previous conquests combined. The temple’s destruction was accompanied by the systematic removal of gold idols, coins, and offerings back to Ghazni, funding mosques, armies, and administrative expansion across Central Asia.
The pattern continued under the Delhi Sultanate. Ibn Battuta, writing in the fourteenth century, described Indian cities as places where wealth flowed like water. Ziauddin Barani’s Tarikh i Firoz Shahi details how Alauddin Khalji financed his permanent standing army through the seizure of temple endowments across Gujarat, Rajasthan, and the Deccan. Gold was melted, recoined, and redistributed to sustain imperial power.
The Mughal period, often remembered for administrative refinement, rested on inherited and freshly extracted gold. Babur, in the Baburnama, marvelled at the immense treasures encountered after defeating Ibrahim Lodi. Abul Fazl’s Ain i Akbari documents imperial treasuries holding enormous quantities of gold coins, jewels, and ornaments, much of it derived from land revenues historically paid in precious metal and temple wealth absorbed into state control.
Perhaps the most dramatic extraction occurred in 1739, when Nadir Shah of Persia invaded Delhi. Persian historian Muhammad Kazim Marvi, in Alam Ara yi Nadiri, records the seizure of the Peacock Throne, vast stores of gold coinage, and jewels including the Koh i Noor diamond. Modern historians estimate that Nadir Shah carried away wealth equivalent to several years of Mughal revenue, temporarily destabilizing the subcontinent’s economy.
This cycle repeated with Ahmad Shah Abdali, whose invasions between 1748 and 1767 targeted temple towns and treasuries across North India. Each invasion extracted accumulated gold, yet never exhausted it.
What distinguishes Bharat from other plundered civilizations is not the absence of loss, but the persistence of recovery. Gold was not centralized in a single imperial vault vulnerable to annihilation. It was dispersed across households, temples, guilds, and local institutions. Each wave of extraction removed visible wealth, yet left intact the deeper cultural instinct to save, rebuild, and reconsecrate gold.
By the time colonial rule began, European observers were astonished to find that despite centuries of invasions, Bharat remained among the richest regions on earth. François Bernier, the French physician to Aurangzeb, described India as the sink of gold and silver of the world, echoing Pliny’s lament made more than sixteen centuries earlier.
The age of invasions therefore did not sever Bharat’s relationship with gold. It refined it. Gold ceased to be merely imperial treasure and became civilizational capital, protected not by walls, but by ritual, family, and faith.
The Colonial Drain
Colonial rule transformed episodic plunder into systematic extraction. Through taxation, trade monopolies, and currency manipulation, Bharat’s wealth was transferred outward for nearly two centuries. Modern economic historians estimate this drain at the equivalent of $45 trillion.
Gold that once circulated organically within society was redirected into foreign reserves. Yet even during famine and political subjugation, Bharatiya families continued to acquire gold quietly. Jewellery became survival capital. Gold outlived imposed currencies and political authority.
The Hidden Vaults of Faith
The Sree Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Kerala offers a glimpse into this continuity. When several of its vaults were opened in 2011, treasures exceeding billions & billions of dollars were documented. Gold idols, coins, and offerings lay untouched for centuries. One chamber, Vault B, remains sealed by tradition. Estimates suggest its contents may exceed Fort Knox, yet no urgency exists to open it.
The restraint itself reveals the Bharatiya instinct. Gold is to be preserved, not exhausted.
Gold Through Life and Ritual
From birth to death, gold sanctifies the Bharatiya journey. At birth rituals, it symbolizes vitality and protection. During upanayana, it represents commitment to knowledge. In marriage, gold forms strīdhan, a woman’s independent wealth and enduring security.
Festivals renew this bond. On Dhanteras, gold invites Lakṣmī into the household. On Akṣaya Tṛtīyā, gold acquired in faith is believed to grow inexhaustibly. During Navaratri and Vara Lakṣmī Vrata, gold offerings affirm harmony between material prosperity and spiritual duty.
Gold marks every transition because it carries continuity.
Modern Continuity
Today, Bharat accounts for nearly 25 percent of global annual gold demand. Villages treat gold as collateral and inheritance. Cities treat it as investment and heirloom. Financial instruments attempt substitution, yet cultural memory prevails.
Gold in Bharat is not speculation. It is preservation.
The Dharma of Prosperity
Across invasions, colonial extraction, and modern finance, Bharat’s relationship with gold has remained intact. Each cycle of loss was followed by regeneration. Saving in gold became instinct shaped by philosophy.
Within Hindu Dharma, prosperity is not rejected but disciplined. Gold mirrors the sustaining principle of Śrī Hari, wealth held in service of order, family, and duty. Guided by this understanding, Bharatiyas have accumulated the largest collective reserve of gold in human history, dispersed not in a single vault, but across millions of homes and temples.
Bharat’s gold is therefore more than metal. It is civilizational memory rendered luminous. It is resilience shaped into radiance. It is proof that while empires rise and fall, a civilization guided by Śrī Hari quietly accumulates, preserves, and ultimately claims the enduring riches of the world.
— Ashmodhrav Vaswani
