Sonia Gandhi’s book Belonging: A Journey of Love is pitched as a memoir, as a tender recounting of a love’s journey. But the book has a more complicated, if not confused, structure. First, it is not just a slice of her life, as a conventional memoir would be; it is about her entire life. Second, it has an inverted autobiographical structure. It begins with her love story, foregrounds it at crucial bends, but soon falls back to a linear, chronological storytelling of her beginnings in Italy and the rest of her life in India.
Hair-splitting about whether the book technically falls into this or that genre should matter less. What is of importance is the recollection and unravelling of an epic life at a time when Sonia Gandhi’s place of physical and emotional belonging is said to be under serious threat. That is, even as many feel the dynasty is under threat, Sonia Gandhi feels the nation has been terribly checkmated by communal forces, and asserts, through an assumed inheritance, her family’s role as its supreme custodian.
An undercurrent runs across the book’s narrative, unabashedly advancing the idea that the nation survives if the dynasty perseveres and preserves itself against humungous odds. The book does not at any point elevate itself to negotiate real democracy. But, as much as an attempt is made to wrap it all prettily in love, or use it as a caveat to any form of reproach, it increasingly becomes entangled in the twists of power, politics and contemporary history. At no point in the book can a reader unsee Sonia Gandhi’s true placement, enormous privilege and abundant prejudice.
Early on, when the book was announced and nobody had a clue about its contents, there was a thin debate about whether a publisher could fact-check a memoir. But it is common knowledge that memories are a deeply contested space. How the past is reconstructed determines how one survives the present and rescues the future. In this sense, the past can never really be past. It is constantly deployed to meet the exigencies of the present. Whether it is about reconstructing a civilisational past for the nation or rewriting a powerful dynasty’s trajectory, the projects appear paradoxically similar.
Ironically, the most vigorous activity around the book in the short period since its release has been fact-checking. It has blown up the defence that a memoir is permitted its knotted viewpoints and its silences outside the straight lines of history. Since Sonia Gandhi’s memory intersects with history all along, it has clashed with the living memory of people, and also with the drafts of institutional memory. There are uncontestable personal sections in the book, because there is no second witness, but when it comes to collective memory, say, for instance, the Emergency, the Sikh riots or events of 2004 and later, the book turns into a minefield.
What could possibly be the deep instinct that encouraged this memoir? What it does or intends to do through its pages is an inescapable question. Besides other allurements, it is unmistakably about the refurbishment of the dynasty’s image. Throughout the book, there is a new, deeply sensitive, cutely traditional and constantly embattled Indira Gandhi who elicits sympathy. There is a complete restoration of Feroze Gandhi and his side of the family. His sister Tehmina emerges from obscurity as a trusted counsellor (pages 123-124). The ‘regret’ that Indira Gandhi expressed to the author about her break from her husband is significant (page 129). There is a lovable, friendly, humorous, hard-working, yet impetuous Sanjay Gandhi, who is, of course, sadly led astray by the ambitions of his wife. Rajiv Gandhi’s prescience, generosity, restraint, righteousness and discipline literally punctuate the entire book. There is a certain infallibility of a private god ascribed to him.
And then there is the restraint, maturity and truncated childhood of her children. Even a five-year-old Priyanka imparts lessons in forgiveness (page 215). This should connect us with the treatment of Rajiv Gandhi’s killers later by the family and the struggles and imperfections of reconciliation. Finally, there is a deepening of the image of the author’s self as an undistracted wife and daughter-in-law, whose life was interrupted by politics because she carried the burden of the dynasty’s ‘destiny’ of saving the nation. Just as her mother-in-law agreed to join Lal Bahadur Shastri’s cabinet when she felt her father’s idea of India was at stake (page 131), later Rajiv Gandhi, too, had to bear the yoke after his mother’s passing.
Even as Sonia Gandhi recollects the family’s precariousness in the post-Emergency loss of power, the CBI arrests, CID raids, the physical attacks, the commissions of inquiry, the Christmas in Tihar jail, the ridiculous sack of fresh peas mistaken for treasures and the eventual re-election and restoration (pages 225-230), there is a retrospective light-heartedness about the past. However, there is a serious resonance for the present in it all, when the family feels similarly harassed by the Modi-Shah regime. It quietly seems to signal that we have seen it all, and we possess the technique to resuscitate ourselves. It is about keeping the faith in dynastic perenniality.
There is not so much about Jawaharlal Nehru in this book, but interestingly Sonia Gandhi is the only one in the dynasty to have written a memoir/autobiography after him. But their two books are a study in contrast. While Nehru was deeply reflective and never took his eyes off the larger churnings of history around him, Sonia Gandhi grows blind to everything else and everyone because she places the family at the centre. Nehru had the courage to write in his autobiography that his “reputation as a hero” was “entirely a bogus one”. He also said: “[T]here is the idea of mixing in high society and living a life of luxury and then renouncing it all, and renunciation has always appealed to the Indian mind. As a basis for a reputation, this does not at all appeal to me. I prefer the active virtues to the passive ones.”
There is no palpable tension in Sonia Gandhi’s book because her belonging was guaranteed right from the start. If there is a struggle, it is only about her emerging from the footnote of history, and from complete domesticity, to a kind of centrality and significance in the life of a nation. Her life, in her own words, is largely controlled by accidents, not by any original purpose.
Sugata Srinivasaraju | Senior journalist and author of The Conscience Network: A Chronicle of Resistance to a Dictatorship
(Views are personal)
(sugatasriraju@gmail.com)