Sonia Gandhi says memoir Belonging will cause 'tamasha'; out November 10

Congress leader Sonia Gandhi has said her forthcoming memoir, Belonging: A Journey of Love, is likely to cause "tamasha", a stir, and that she wrote it because much of what has been written about her is either invented or exaggerated. In a short video teaser posted on X on Tuesday, October 27, 2026, she said it was her turn to tell her own story, and recalled that she had been against her husband Rajiv Gandhi becoming prime minister. The 544-page book is due for a worldwide release on November 10, 2026, published globally by Alfred A. Knopf and in India by HarperCollins India.

First-person accounts by women who have been at the centre of Indian politics are an important part of the record. By her own account, much of what the public has read about Sonia Gandhi has been written by others, and she considers a good deal of it invented or exaggerated. A memoir changes that: it is her own record, in her own words, of how she saw the events she lived through and the choices she made.

Her framing in the teaser is notable. She did not present the book as a political statement but as a personal account, and she acknowledged in advance that readers will react differently, that some may think more kindly of her and others less, and that this comes with writing a book and being in public life. Her decision is to answer others' accounts with a personal record of her own.

The detail that she had opposed her husband becoming prime minister is a reminder of a theme that runs through many women's paths in public life: entering politics not by plan but through family circumstance, and then having to build authority in their own right. How she describes that journey, from a reluctant spouse of a prime minister to a political leader herself, is likely to be the book's most closely read part.

The publishing history has already drawn attention. The book was expected from Penguin Random House India before HarperCollins India took it on, and reports have offered different accounts of why the earlier arrangement ended. Penguin has said only that it is not the book's publisher in India.

Short-term: The teaser and pre-orders will build interest ahead of the November 10 release, and political responses can be expected once the text is public. Readers, historians and journalists will compare her account with existing ones.

Long-term: The memoir will become a primary source on decades of Indian political history from the point of view of one of its central figures, told in her own words.

Who is affected: Readers of political history and biography; the Congress party and its opponents; historians and journalists who have written about the period; and publishers in India and abroad.

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