How many grams in one sovereign, savaran or pavan

One sovereign of gold is 8 grams. If your jeweller says savaran, pavan, or pound, they mean the same 8 grams. Half a savaran is 4 grams and a quarter is 2 grams.

At today’s 22K rate of ₹12,973.30 per gram, one savaran of 22K gold holds ₹1,03,786 of metal. That is the metal value alone, before making charges, hallmarking and GST.

Where the 8 grams comes from

The unit is named after a coin. The British gold sovereign, struck since 1817 and minted in Bombay for a few years from 1918, weighs 7.98805 grams and is 22 carat, which works out at 7.322 grams of pure gold inside it. Sovereigns circulated widely in southern India, and the coin’s weight became the unit people bought gold in.

Nobody wants to price an ornament against 7.98805, so the trade rounded up to 8 and never looked back. The gap is about twelve thousandths of a gram per sovereign. It is too small to argue about on one chain and too small to matter on ten.

One unit, four names

Which word you hear depends on where you are standing, not on what you are buying.

• Savaran, sometimes written saveran, in Tamil Nadu.
• Pavan, sometimes written pavun, in Kerala.
• Sovereign in English across the south, and on most printed bills.
• Pound, still used by some older shops, from the coin’s original face value of one pound sterling.

A shop in Coimbatore quoting per savaran and a shop in Thrissur quoting per pavan are quoting the same weight. Northern and western India mostly skip the unit and quote per gram or per 10 grams instead, which is also how the daily benchmark rate is published.

The mistake worth avoiding

A savaran is a weight. It is not a purity, not a grade, and not a guarantee of anything. Eight grams of 18K jewellery is exactly one savaran, and so is eight grams of 22K, but they are not worth the same.

One savaran of 22K holds ₹1,03,786 of metal today. One savaran of 18K holds ₹84,978. Same weight, a difference of ₹18,808, because 22K is 91.6% gold and 18K is 75%.

So “two savaran chain” is half a description. Ask for the carat as well, and check the hallmark stamped on the piece rather than taking it on trust.

Gross weight and net weight

When a piece has stones in it, the savaran figure on the tag is usually the gross weight, the whole ornament on the scale. You are paying the gold rate on gold, not on the stones, so the bill should show a net metal weight as well, with stones priced separately.

If a quotation gives you one weight and no breakdown, ask for the net. This is the single most common place where a savaran price turns out to mean less gold than you assumed.

Converting between units

A sovereign is 8 grams. A tola, the older north Indian unit, is 11.6638 grams. Ten grams is the unit the daily rate is quoted in. The unit converter moves between all of them, and the gold calculator turns any weight into what the metal in it is worth at today’s rate.