Last year, India’s Supreme Court ruled that women have an inalienable right to certain property after marriage. Brides, the court said, can lay claim to their stridhan, even if they leave their husbands without getting divorced. This stridhan, whose name comes from ancient Hindu law, is the gold and jewels given as gifts by families to their daughters as insurance for life after marriage.
For many communities in South Asia, where banking systems are unevenly developed and gold is sometimes the most trusted mechanism for transporting wealth, stridhan is the only property a woman explicitly owns.
The marriageable woman, in this way, is the backbone of the Asian jewellery market. But as first-generation immigrants in Britain who brought these traditions over are succeeded by their children and grandchildren, the market is being forced to reinvent itself.
Once the centre of a bustling jewellery trade, Sparkhill jewellers now more often make headlines for the crime they attract. One goldsmith, Atif Sheraz, says he was robbed while walking between his shop and his car. The display cases inside his store are bare — you must ask in order to see anything — and customary masala chai tea is not on offer.
Birmingham boasts one of Britain’s densest South Asian communities, with more than a fifth of its population having Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi origin, according to the 2011 census.
But according to Jaimin Soni of jewellers AG & Sons, who paid £4,000 to display his diamonds at this year’s annual trade fair in Birmingham, the key to survival for Asian jewellers is cross-selling to the larger British market, which is worth approximately £2.5bn a year.
The Jewellery & Watch exhibition is what fair portfolio director Julie Driscoll calls “a mammoth security operation” for “very high value jewellery”. It takes place in the city’s National Exhibition Centre because it is the only building large enough to host the spring event of which the fair is a part.
But Ms Driscoll says “there wasn’t appetite” for Indian wholesalers at the show. “My understanding is that [British Asian] jewellery is very different. Would it appeal to independent retail jewellers in the UK that would sell it to UK consumers? To my knowledge,” she says, “there is not a big trend for that at the moment.”
In the London borough of Newham, another heartland for British Asians, Jayant Raniga buzzes in a client as the daylight fades on Green Street.
Through the door walks Jag, a professional in her 30s, smartly dressed with brightly painted red nails. Beside her is a bespectacled old lady in traditional dress, her handbag clutched tightly. “This,” Jag declares, “is my nani.”
Jag’s grandmother chatters in Hindi to Mr Raniga, the brand director at PureJewels and grandson of the man who brought the shop to Britain in 1975. Nani is from Kolkata, in West Bengal, which she still calls Calcutta, its imperial name. Jag speaks to Jayant in English.
For Jag, who has a full-time job and career ambitions, wedding jewels hardly seem a necessary hedge against the future. But she insists the inclination to buy gold as security has survived in her cultural consciousness: “Nani said buying gold is always a good thing as an investment.”
Jayant Raniga of PureJewels:
Green Street, a long, still-grubby high road in which sari shops and curry houses bustle with the trade of a large British-Indian and Bangladeshi diaspora, boasts dozens of shops still targeting women like Jag. The area is poor, but a multi-million-pound South Asian shopping mall that opened on the street last year suggests a belief in future fortunes.
Still, Mr Raniga, who has become an unofficial spokesman for Green Street, says he is looking to move. “Our future clients don’t want to shop in the Asian areas except when it’s wedding time,” he says. “To have Jag aspire to own one of our rings is rare, it means we’ve punched above our weight.”
Mr Raniga, who has experience in private banking and risk management with Merrill Lynch and Deutsche Bank, took over PureJewels in 2003. The business began as Bhanji Gokaldas and Sons in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1950, and Mr Raniga now wants to take it to a more affluent area of London, such as the West End.
Until then, he focuses on the client at hand. Jag has removed from its case an enormous wedding ring made of multiple snaking bands of diamond-encrusted platinum. She sighs. “Now my only problem is finding a groom.”
April 28, 2016: This article was updated to correct India’s gold consumption: it is 1,000 tonnes a year, not 100,000
Credits
Written by Aliya Ram
Photography by Neville Williams and Anna Gordon
Edited by Josh Spero
Graphics by Graham Parrish
Filming by Alan Knox
Production by Alan Knox, George Kyriakos and Josh Spero
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