What will Sonia Gandhi's memoir reveal about India's most powerful dynasty?

When Sonia Gandhi became president of India's main opposition Congress party in 1998, she was an unlikely and largely enigmatic political leader.

Italian-born and the widow of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, she had spent years avoiding the political spotlight before taking charge of a party that had dominated much of independent India's history.

In her early months, India Today magazine described Sonia as "quite an enigma to her partymen" - "inscrutable", shielded from the world by a security cordon and known for her "laconic one-liners in an alien accent".

Yet beneath the reticence, the magazine detected a politician already learning how to exercise power. She listened to competing arguments, gathered information and then made up her own mind. "Nobody is left out of the decision-making process and no voice is gagged. But it is her word that prevails," it reported.

Nearly three decades later, after a political journey that took her from reluctant outsider to the most powerful figure in Congress, India's oldest political party, Sonia Gandhi is offering her own account.

The 79-year-old's story is marked by extraordinary personal loss: she rushed her mother-in-law, Indira Gandhi, to hospital after her bodyguards shot her, and brought her husband, Rajiv Gandhi, home after a suicide bomber killed him seven years later.

Her autobiography, Belonging: A Journey of Love, which will be published in November by Alfred A Knopf in the US and William Collins in the UK, is likely to be one of the most closely watched political books in India.

In a statement issued through Alfred A Knopf, Gandhi says she wants this memoir "to be a testament of my heart's journey through the tender joys and dark despair that have marked my life".

According to William Collins, the book opens in Cambridge in 1965, where 19-year-old Italian student Sonia Maino falls in love with Rajiv Gandhi, grandson of India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.

In this "revelatory" account, the publishers say, the famously reticent Sonia looks back with "warmth and candour" on a life shaped by love, exile, political power and devastating loss - from her childhood in small-town Italy to her unexpected journey into the heart of Indian politics.

The memoir has already become the subject of a publishing dispute in India.

Reports that Penguin Random House India had sought changes to parts of the manuscript were followed by allegations from Congress leaders that the publisher had come under political pressure to alter passages critical of the government. Penguin has disputed that account, saying it "remained keen and willing to publish the book" while the "relevant discussions" were going on.

Yet readers will be looking for more than the story of how a young, foreign woman married into India's most powerful political family.

They will want answers to some of modern Indian politics' biggest unresolved questions: what drew her into politics, and what happened behind the scenes when the Congress returned to power in 2004 after eight years out of office?

The biggest mystery may be why Sonia, despite having the backing of her party and allies, declined the prime ministership and chose Manmohan Singh, the architect of India's economic liberalisation, instead.

Did she fear that her foreign origins would permanently undermine her government?

"I think that is really the biggest unanswered question. She could easily have become prime minister - she had the full backing of her party and allies, and the president's office had a letter ready inviting her to form the government," says journalist and author Neerja Chowdhury.

In his memoirs, former Congress leader and foreign minister Natwar Singh wrote that Sonia's son Rahul Gandhi was "vehemently" opposed to his mother becoming prime minister, fearing she would meet the fate of his grandmother and father.

Matters reached a "climax", Singh wrote, when Rahul said he was prepared to take "any possible step" to stop her. Will Sonia's memoir shed new light on that extraordinary decision - or offer a very different account of what really happened behind the scenes?

Whatever the reason, her decision transformed Indian politics. But that decision is only one part of a larger mystery: why did Sonia Gandhi enter politics in the first place?

She had spent years resisting a political career. After the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991, she remained largely outside public life. But as the Congress declined through the 1990s, she joined the party in 1997 and became its president less than a year later.

At the time, she was widely dismissed by her rivals. In December 1998, India Today reported that, initially, leading opposition politicians called her little more than a "housewife" or an "Italian wonder". Yet, within months, she had begun transforming her party. One Congress veteran admitted: "I never thought that the lady could spring such a surprise."

The magazine was already detecting a formidable political operator. It described her as having an "iron fist under the velvet glove", and observed that she knew how to "cut down Himalayan egos to the height of foothills".

Then there are the tragedies that made her political career possible.

Sonia witnessed the transformation of her family after Indira Gandhi's assassination in 1984. Seven years later, she lost Rajiv to a suicide bomber. The deaths changed the course of Indian politics - and her own life.

What will she say about those years? About Rajiv's political career, which she had strongly resisted? About the security fears surrounding her children? And about the moment she decided that the Gandhi family's political inheritance could not simply be abandoned?

There are also uncomfortable questions.

Will she discuss Bofors, the scandal that badly damaged Rajiv Gandhi's government and generated decades of controversy around the family's links to Italian businessman Ottavio Quattrocchi? Will she revisit the allegations and explain what she knew?

And what about the furore over her Italian origins?

For years, Sonia was criticised as a foreigner who could not legitimately lead India. In Delhi's social circles, she was sometimes derided as "the Italian au pair". A person of foreign origin becoming prime minister, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Sushma Swaraj declared in 2004, "would be an insult to the nation"- she vowed to resign, tonsure her head, wear white and live as an ascetic if Sonia took the job.

"As early as in 1999, even a group of Congress leaders had raised questions about her foreign origins. Did she ever think of leaving the country?" says journalist and author Rasheed Kidwai.

Political observers also wonder whether the book could shed light on the paradoxes of the Congress-led government between 2004 and 2014.

Under Sonia's leadership, Congress won two successive national elections and backed landmark measures including the right to information law and the rural employment guarantee programme.

Yet its second term was overwhelmed by corruption allegations, policy paralysis and a growing sense that the party had become captive to its own leadership.

Sonia's critics called her the government's "remote control" - they wondered how much power she wielded over Singh. Her defenders saw her as the political force holding together a notoriously difficult coalition.

And then there is Rahul Gandhi.

Sonia ultimately handed the Congress leadership to her son in 2017. Many believe his failure to revive the party is central to the story of the Gandhi family's decline.

In her 1994 book called Rajiv, Sonia wrote that she had "fought like a tiger" to prevent Rajiv from entering politics. Yet she eventually passed that inheritance to Rahul.

Rahul's political journey has hardly been smooth: he was once dismissed as a reluctant politician and often lampooned by rivals as an absentee leader.

"How does Sonia see her son's very different political style and worldview? And how much does she endorse his politics? I hope the book answers these questions," says Kidwai.

Another question is why Sonia chose Rahul, rather than his more naturally charismatic sister Priyanka, to carry the family's political legacy - and why Priyanka, despite years of speculation about a political role, only formally entered electoral politics in 2019.

"Sonia's stock answer would be that it would be up to my children to decide whether to join politics," says Kidwai.

There is a larger question, too: what does Sonia Gandhi think of the India she helped shape?

She led Congress during a period when Indian politics moved from coalition governments and economic liberalisation towards the much more dominant politics of Narendra Modi's BJP and Hindu nationalism.

But perhaps the most revealing question is what Sonia's memoir will choose to say - and what it will leave unsaid. Neerja Chowdhury suspects the answer may lie in the book's title, Belonging.

"She has been conscious of being an inheritor of the legacy of the Nehru-Gandhi family - that legacy has to be kept alive," Chowdhury says. She expects the memoir to return to family, its history, but above all to Sonia's own sense of belonging to the dynasty and of assuming its political mantle as Congress president.

That legacy, of course, is now under sustained attack.

The ruling BJP has campaigned for a "Congress-mukt Bharat" (Congress-free India), while critics of the party increasingly frame its challenge as a fight against dynastic politics.

As the Congress has suffered repeated electoral setbacks and watched many of its leaders defect to rivals, the question has become not just whether the Gandhi family can revive the party, but whether it can hold it together.

It is a question that goes to the heart of what Sonia says she is trying to examine in her memoir.

"Much has been written about my family, but few narratives were able to reach into the truth of their motivations, their actions and even their very human failings. In many ways, this book is a homage to their humanness," Sonia was quoted as saying on the book.

Her memoir may therefore be less a political reckoning than a defence of belonging - an attempt to explain what the Nehru-Gandhi inheritance has meant to her, and why she believes it still matters.