Sonia’s memoir ‘Belonging’ to chronicle love, loss and six decades of India

Congress leader Sonia Gandhi is set to open a deeply private chapter of her life to the public with the publication of her 544-page memoir, ‘Belonging: A Journey of Love’, in November, describing the book as a journey through the heartbreak, loss, love and loyalty that eventually drew her into the turbulent world of Indian politics.

“It was heartbreak and loss that threw me into the public world of politics. Up till then I had guarded my privacy fiercely,” Sonia Gandhi said in a statement issued on Tuesday by publisher Alfred A Knopf.

The memoir, Sonia Gandhi said, did not come easily.

“Writing about my life did not come easily to me. It meant opening myself up, sharing moments and experiences I had always held deep inside,” she said.

Knopf will release the memoir in hardcover and ebook on 10 November, while an audio edition will be published by Penguin Random House. The publisher has announced an initial print run of 100,000 copies.

Sonia Gandhi said she hoped the book would serve as a “testament of my heart’s journey through the tender joys and dark despair” that have shaped her life.

“Much has been written about my family,” she said, but few accounts, in her view, have delved into the truth behind their motivations and actions or acknowledged their “very human failings”. The memoir, she added, is “in many ways” a tribute to their “humanness”.

From post-war Italy to India

The story traces Sonia Gandhi’s extraordinary passage from childhood in post-war Italy to India, where she married Rajiv Gandhi and became the daughter-in-law of former prime minister Indira Gandhi.

It opens in Cambridge, England, in 1965, when Sonia Maino was a 19-year-old student and met Rajiv Gandhi. Their relationship would eventually take her from the quiet contours of small-town Italy into the heart of one of India’s most influential political families.

The memoir recounts her first encounters with Indira Gandhi and her gradual immersion into Indian life — learning Hindi, wearing saris and developing a taste for Indian food.

But alongside the romance and cultural transformation came a succession of devastating losses.

Rajiv Gandhi’s younger brother, Sanjay Gandhi, died in a plane crash. In 1984, Indira Gandhi was assassinated, after which Rajiv became prime minister. Seven years later, he too was assassinated while campaigning for the Congress.

The book explores how these tragedies altered the course of Sonia Gandhi’s life and ultimately drew her, despite years of resistance, into politics herself.

From reluctant entrant to political force

Sonia Gandhi also recounts her eventual entry into public life after repeatedly resisting calls to assume a political role. The memoir covers the years that followed, including the Congress-led alliance’s victory in the 2004 general election and her decision to decline the post of prime minister.

Looking back after gradually withdrawing from the political arena, Sonia Gandhi said she began to see more clearly the “thread of love and loyalty” that had run through her life.

That journey, she said, carried her from “the simplicity of my childhood in small-town Italy” to the far more intricate realities of her years in India.

A personal lens on a changing India

Beyond the intimate contours of her family story, ‘Belonging’ promises a sweeping view of the social and political transformations Sonia Gandhi witnessed during more than six decades in India.

She describes India as “the beautiful country of my belonging” and says her story offers a distinctive perspective on the country’s evolution, from its social and economic changes to its shifting political landscape.

Knopf describes the memoir as an intimate account of love, family and India, set against the backdrop of the country’s “tumultuous post-independence history and its present political struggles”.

The publisher said the book also offers an insider’s perspective on India’s economic and social transformation over six decades, while examining themes of identity, duty and the meaning of home.

Jordan Pavlin, executive vice-president, publisher and editor-in-chief of Knopf, said the publishing house was “honoured” to bring the memoir to readers, describing it as a story of Sonia Gandhi’s life, resilience, family and history.

For Sonia Gandhi, however, the memoir appears to be as much an act of personal reckoning as a political record — a rare opening of a life long guarded from public scrutiny, shaped by love, marked by loss and ultimately bound to a country she came to call home.

With PTI inputs