Highlights
- Sonia Gandhi says writing about her life meant opening up about experiences she had kept private.
- The memoir follows her journey from post-war Italy to a life in India.
- Gandhi also writes about her decision to turn down the prime minister’s post in 2004.
WRITING about some of the most painful chapters of her life has meant opening up in ways Sonia Gandhi had avoided for decades.
India's Congress party leader has described heartbreak and loss as the forces that eventually drew her into public life, after years of fiercely protecting her privacy.
“It was heartbreak and loss that threw me into the public world of politics. Up till then I had guarded my privacy fiercely,” Gandhi said in a statement released by publisher Alfred A Knopf.
Her 544-page memoir, Belonging: A Journey of Love, is due to be published on November 10. In it, Gandhi looks back at a life shaped by love, family, political duty and a series of tragedies that transformed her from a young woman from Italy into one of India's most prominent political figures.
“Writing about my life did not come easily to me,” Gandhi said. “It meant opening myself up, sharing moments and experiences I had always held deep inside.”
The memoir begins in Cambridge, England, in 1965, when Sonia Maino was a 19-year-old student. There she met and fell in love with Rajiv Gandhi. They married three years later.
Her life then took her from the simplicity of her childhood in small-town Italy to the political world of India, where she became Rajiv Gandhi's wife and the daughter-in-law of then prime minister Indira Gandhi.
Meeting Indira Gandhi
Gandhi writes about meeting Indira Gandhi, learning Hindi, wearing saris and adapting to Indian food and life. But the family she joined was also to face repeated tragedy.
Rajiv Gandhi's younger brother, Sanjay Gandhi, died in a plane crash. In 1984, Indira Gandhi was assassinated. Rajiv then became prime minister, before he too was assassinated seven years later while campaigning.
This book cover image released by Alfred A. Knopf shows 'Belonging: A Journey of Love' by Sonia Gandhi. (AP/PTI)
For Sonia Gandhi, those losses became part of a life she had never expected to share with the public.
She says the book is a “testament of my heart's journey through the tender joys and dark despair” that marked her life.
As she gradually stepped away from politics and looked back on those years, Gandhi said she could see more clearly the “thread of love and loyalty” running through her life.
The memoir also follows her eventual decision to enter politics after years of resisting pressure to do so. In 2004, after the Congress-led alliance won the election, she declined the post of prime minister.
Changing India
Gandhi also reflects on the wider changes she witnessed in India over six decades, describing it as “the beautiful country of my belonging”.
Much has already been written about the Gandhi family, she said, but she felt many accounts had not reached the truth of their motivations, actions and human failings.
The memoir, she said, is, in many ways, an homage to their “humanness”.
Knopf described the book as an intimate account of love, family and India, as well as a personal view of the country's social and political changes.
The publisher's description says Gandhi invites readers into her private world of “joys and travails” while reflecting on identity, duty and the meaning of home.
The book will be released in hardcover and ebook by Knopf, with an audio edition to be published by Penguin Random House. Knopf has announced a first printing of 100,000 copies.
