BOOK
REVIEW Women who shaped
India Sonia Gandhi: An
Extraordinary Life, an Indian Destiny by
Rani Singh.
Reviewed by
Dinesh Sharma
"Father Time in India is a
mother," wrote the late Erik Erikson almost a
half-century ago. "Historically, all this may be
related to an ancient and stubborn trend to
preserve the India of the mother goddess against
all the conquerors, their father gods, and their
historical logic."
Rani Singh's biography
of Sonia Gandhi is a testament to Erikson's astute
psychoanalytic and historical observation. This
rare biography reveals the inner workings of a
special bond between Sonia Gandhi, the president
of the Indian National
Congress, and Indira
Gandhi, her late mother-in-law, who was prime
minister for almost 15 years and by all measures
indelibly shaped the modern Indian psyche.
In an often tragic and violent transfer of
power that no Hollywood or Bollywood script could
ever conjure up, Sonia Gandhi took over the reins
of the largest democratic party in India from her
mother-in-law and matriarch Indira Gandhi and her
husband Rajiv Gandhi, both of whom were brutally
assassinated.
Today, the girl born as
Antonia Edvige Albina Maino on December 9, 1946,
in a small Roman Catholic village called Lusiana
in the Italian Alps, who probably never dreamed of
a life in India as a child, is not only in charge
of the largest populist democracy in the world,
but is also responsible for ushering in a
generational transfer from the old Nehru-Gandhi
dynasty to the next batch of political leadership
taking the country into the 21st century.
As she grooms her son Rahul and daughter
Priyanka to carry on the family tradition, it is
not surprising that she has emerged as a key
power-broker, a role by all accounts she neither
publicly wanted nor privately wished for but, as
Rani Singh reveals, she was groomed for in some
direct and subtle ways.
Hail Mother
India There is a truism that biography is a
handmaiden to history. This is amply borne out in
this first international biography of Sonia
Gandhi, covering the 65 years of family history
from India's independence in 1947 to the present.
Singh offers not just a leisurely writing style,
but observations she has packed with a concise
history of modern India's most powerful political
family.
For those growing up in India
during the 1970s and 1980s there was a well-known
slogan that "India is Indira, and Indira is
India." Even young schoolchildren could recite the
stories of India's political dynasty, headed by
its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and
then passed on to his only daughter, Indira
Gandhi, who truly made it a family business.
Rani Singh recounts all the details, with
interesting twists and turns, of how the Italian
daughter-in-law becomes the favored bahu in
the Gandhi household, while she actively looks
after her extended family, educates her children
through home schooling and cloistered private
schools, and develops a special relationship with
her mother-in-law, whom she fondly calls her
"mummy".
All the while the various members
of the Nehru-Gandhi clan meet tragic ends, Sanjay
in a plane crash, Indira to the fury of Sikh
assassins, Rajiv to an explosives-strapped Tamil
Tiger terrorist, and her sister-in-law Manaka
Gandhi through defection to a rival political
party, Indira Gandhi emerges as the archetypal
mother figure, not unlike the protagonist from the
classic film Mother India, who loses both
her sons but defends her honor, land and
izzat (prestige) until the very end.
Through it all, it is the larger-than-life
image of Indira - or mummy - that guides Sonia in
a mother-daughter relationship. For all her best
efforts to keep her family divorced from politics,
Sonia is pushed and pulled by the circumstances
beyond her control; as she loses each and every
member of her Indian extended family, she is seen
as clutching to her children ever so tightly for
the fear of losing them to political vendettas and
blood feuds.
Yet her Indian destiny is
apparently much stronger than her wish to keep
away from politics, suggests Rani Singh. The
Italian-born daughter-in-law has become one with
India, the land and its people, as she travels
every corner of the country, listening to people
at political rallies, feeling their plight,
holding their hands in times of need, and offering
assistance to the poor and the destitute.
India's love affair with the
West Sonia Gandhi's epic narrative begins
with a love story, a chance meeting at a Greek
restaurant, Varsity, near Trinity College,
Cambridge, of her future husband, Rajiv Gandhi,
who is studying abroad very much like his maternal
grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru, did.
In
this respect, any biography of Sonia Gandhi would
have to be interpreted as part of India's long
fascination with Western women, who historically
played a critical but supporting role in India's
independence struggle. This theme has been
documented in the life of Swami Vivekananda and
his association with Sister Nivedita, an
Anglo-Irish woman who became his disciple, Mahatma
Gandhi and his association with Mira Bhen, the
daughter of an English admiral, Sri Aurobindo's
association with the French disciple Mira
Richards, and Nehru's love for Edwina Mountbatten,
the wife of the last viceroy of India.
When Rajiv Gandhi decided to marry well
beyond his immediate kin group, he was following a
roughly hewn path of admiration and love of
Western women, as displayed by his own
grandfather. In other words, the Sonia Gandhi
narrative has to be situated within the larger
framework of Western women - spiritualists,
religious missionaries, theosophists and
humanitarian workers - who worked for India's
liberation during the colonial and post-colonial
period, where countercultural movements found an
easy home in India, as they continue to even
today.
Today, several female chief
ministers and governors run large states in India,
while the president is also a woman. Thus even by
Western standards, female politicians are on a par
with leaders in any other country. Thus Sonia
Gandhi's rise is part of a larger trend where
Indian women have made huge strides.
There
is no family in India that has sacrificed more
than the Nehru-Gandhi family, and the Gandhi women
have taken on the heaviest burden in their loss,
grief and loneliness. Rani Singh covers it all -
assassinations, accidents, and traumas - with all
its highs and lows. As an expatriate Indian, I was
fascinated to read the detailed reports of these
events with the accumulation of newly gathered
evidence.
Flashbulb memories associated
with historical events carry scars. When Indira
Gandhi was killed by her Sikh bodyguards to avenge
Operation Blue Star on the Golden Temple in
Amritsar, I was a young teenager in Chicago; I
remember the Delhi riots that ensued. I also
remember the Rajiv Gandhi assassination by Tamil
Tiger terrorists, which the author describes in
gripping detail. I was flooded with nostalgia, a
rush of memories about living far away from the
country of my birth.
Reading this
narrative, I was reminded again of the often-made
observation that India remains a land of
contradictions:
The largest democracy on the planet, which
remains one of the most hierarchical societies;
A land with some of the wealthiest men in the
world continues to have abysmal poverty; and
A country where women have shaped the destiny
of the nation from the highest offices in the
land, but everyday women still lag behind on
measures of education, health and mortality.
As Jawaharlal Nehru said poignantly, "The
service of India means … the ending of poverty and
ignorance and disease and inequality of
opportunity. The ambition of the greatest man of
our generation has been to wipe every tear from
every eye. That may be beyond us, but as long as
there are tears and suffering, so long our work
will not be over."
Through the life of
Sonia Gandhi, however, Rani Singh not only gives
us a glimpse of the old India passing away
gracefully, but of the new India that is on the
horizon, driven by several important demographic
trends that are playing out in the life of a young
nation hungry for success.
India's market
reforms initiated by Rajiv Gandhi have now borne
results over two decades. We have seen the new
generation of political leaders coming into their
own led by Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi. While a
new generation of global Indians comes up
economically, both the mother and son have won
their seats long held by the Nehru-Gandhi family
from Rae Bareli and Amethi respectively.
Recently, the power has been peacefully
transferred in a multiparty system to India's new
prime minister, Manmohan Singh, who was the
architect of economic liberalization, while Sonia
Gandhi leads policy initiatives in the newly
formed coalition and manages her late husband's
charitable foundation. Through tragedy and
travail, Sonia has unified the divided Congress
party, and the work begun by the Nehru-Gandhi
family four generations ago continues today.
According to Singh, "The little girl who
grew up in protective family and the loving
shelter of the Salesian sisterhood in a small
Italian town is now leading a coalition running a
country of a billion people … Sonia's story
represents the greatest transformational journey
made by any world leader of the last four decades.
She has been faithful to her adopted country and
to the memory of her husband.
"Rajiv and
Sonia were the eternal teen lovers. Whatever Sonia
Gandhi is today is what a woman can be if she
finds true love."
Sonia Gandhi: An
Extraordinary Life, an Indian Destiny by Rani
Singh (2011) is published in New York by Palgrave
MacMillan. ISBN: 0230341608. 320 pages.
Dinesh Sharma is the author
ofBarack Obama in Hawaii and Indonesia: The
Making of a Global President, a regular
contributor to Asia Times Online and the host of
AsianTimesTV.
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Today, the girl born as
Antonia Edvige Albina Maino on December 9, 1946,
in a small Roman Catholic village called Lusiana
in the Italian Alps, who probably never dreamed of
a life in India as a child, is not only in charge
of the largest populist democracy in the world,
but is also responsible for ushering in a
generational transfer from the old Nehru-Gandhi
dynasty to the next batch of political leadership
taking the country into the 21st century.
