For two decades, Sonia Gandhi’s silence was weaponised against her. She was labelled as a “remote control,” the leader who would not explain herself. Now that she has finally explained herself, very clearly, the BJP labels her memoir, Belonging: A Journey of Love, as “whitewashing”. A woman who embraces the solitude of silence is suspected; a woman who speaks out her heart is accused. That contradiction tells us more about Indian politics—which essentially has been and continues to be patriarchal—than anything the book reveals.
A few days before the memoir’s release, Sonia Gandhi wrote that others “have spent decades telling my story” and that “now it’s my turn.” This assumes importance in India, where women’s voices have been silenced using varied instruments of tangible and intangible violence. This saga of muting women can be traced to the famous episode of Gargi in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. Gargi is silenced when Yajnavalkya, feeling insecure about the possibility of being defeated by a woman, warns her that her head will fall off if she keeps asking questions. Her sovereign voice, sharpened by her intellect, had the potential to diminish and demolish the discourse set by men. But Gargi came back later in the same debate and asked again. The tradition remembers the warning; it should remember the pushback.
My reading of Sonia Gandhi has been that she resembles a persona who dares to follow Gargi’s inspiration and go beyond her in politics, a space designed and heavily dominated by sexism and men. She arrived in India as a foreigner in 1968 and became India’s daughter-in-law, a role that asked for grace, discretion, and silence. She became a widow in 1991, and the burden of norms dictated that she mourn and withdraw. She did not.
Radical authorship
Gandhi later became president of the Indian National Congress and came very close to becoming the country’s prime minister in 2004. Then patriarchy raised its vicious hood again, now using the agency of a woman, a senior opposition leader, who vowed to shave her head and wear white—traditional markers of Hindu widowhood—if Sonia Gandhi took office, as ThePrint recalled this week. This was not new. In 1999, Gandhi had voiced her hurt as her very loyalty to India was being questioned for the sake of petty politics.
What’s more important is that Sonia Gandhi didn’t succumb to these patriarchal pressures. Like her mother-in-law, Indira Gandhi, who refused to confine herself to the assigned role of “goongi gudiya,” (mute doll), she entered politics after initial vacillation and has remained at its centre. Under the UPA coalition, which Sonia Gandhi chaired, the Rajya Sabha passed the Women’s Reservation Bill in 2010.
Her political power began with the family name, and that must be said plainly. It’s important to understand a unique paradox here: patriarchy handed her the role of a widow, carrying her husband’s name in politics. She entered through the door of the dynasty, and the Congress remained a family-led party. But what she did with that position, and how she shaped political processes, were entirely her own.
Now that her memoir has been published, I recall two Italian feminists, Carla Lonzi and Luisa Muraro. In 1978, Lonzi published her diary titled Taci, anzi parla: Be quiet, no, speak. Muraro, who died in June this year, built a politics on partire da sé, starting from oneself: women’s authority begins when they speak from their own experiences, rather than through categories others have demarcated for them. Whether Sonia Gandhi has read them or not, her memoir does what both thinkers describe.
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Gandhi’s life has been recounted by many biographers, novelists, opponents, and former colleagues, each in their own version; her critics called her the reluctant foreigner, the Italian waitress, Congress ki widhwa and worse. Recalling the scrutiny around her illness, she writes, “I had always sought to keep my personal space private.” And she asks, “Did that mean that I wasn’t to be allowed even a modicum of privacy?” Her memoir thus shifts authority from others to herself.
Writing about her own life, as a woman who was made to stand for others, is radical. As with other memoirs, this too will be selective, but what’s radical here is the authorship. It is now Sonia Gandhi who tells her story. The daughter-in-law, expected to be quiet, and the widow, expected to withdraw, now decide what her own life meant. This lesson extends beyond one family to all women who are expected to be abla naris, the “helpless women” of popular imagination.
Gargi was deterred from asking questions. Lonzi was told to be quiet. Sonia Gandhi was blamed for her silence and is now blamed for speaking out. Whether a woman speaks or chooses not to, the fault lies in the rules of society, not in her voice. Belonging matters more for what it refuses than what it reveals: the right of others to decide when a woman may speak and what she may say.
Nikhil Sanjay-Rekha Adsule is a lawyer, an alumnus of TISS, Creighton Peden Scholar, USA, and a Senior Scholar at IIT-Delhi. He tweets @Surajya_Raje_. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)