Congress Parliamentary Party chairperson Sonia Gandhi will release her memoir, 'Belonging: A Journey of Love', on November 10, breaking decades of personal silence to chronicle her five-decade transition from an Italian village to the center of Indian statecraft.
The book is personal, not political. In an essay previewing the text ahead of its domestic rollout by HarperCollins India, the former Congress president said she wrote the volume to portray her family honestly, as people she knew and loved with very human flaws. She guarded her inner world for decades. Only after stepping back from the daily churn of frontline politics did she find the perspective to write openly.
The memoir traces an arc that began in England, where a 19-year-old student from an Italian town met a young Indian student named Rajiv Gandhi. That encounter brought her to India and into an immediate, enduring bond with her mother-in-law, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
Then violence struck. The book details three family tragedies: the death of Sanjay Gandhi in a plane crash, the 1984 assassination of Indira Gandhi, and the 1991 assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. Facing intense internal turmoil over whether to enter politics following her husband's death, she turned to the Bhagavad Gita for guidance before stepping into public life out of duty.
Power followed. Gandhi addresses the aftermath of the 2004 general elections, when she led the Congress alliance to victory, stunned the political establishment by declining the prime minister's chair, and instead steered the ruling coalition for the next decade.
The November 10 release date ends months of uncertainty surrounding the book's domestic publication. Her representatives previously reached an impasse with Penguin Random House India after the publisher grew uneasy with portions of the text containing criticism of the government. HarperCollins India subsequently acquired the rights to publish and distribute the memoir domestically.
Booksellers across India will receive stock ahead of the November 10 launch, marking Gandhi's first comprehensive written account of the country she came to call home.