HarperCollins India will publish Sonia Gandhi's memoir on 10 November

HarperCollins India will publish Sonia Gandhi's memoir in India on 10 November 2026. The title is Belonging: A Journey of Love. The house announced the deal on Friday, a week after Penguin Random House India stepped away from the Indian edition. Alfred A. Knopf, a Penguin Random House imprint in New York, is still publishing the book worldwide and has set a first printing of 100,000 copies.

The Indian Express first reported that the Penguin India relationship had collapsed after Gandhi refused some proposed editorial changes and deletions. Penguin India disputed that account. It said a publisher has a duty to fact-check and to offer recommendations, that the public version of events does not accurately reflect the circumstances, and that it remained willing to publish. Industry sources named the disputed passages: Gandhi's impressions of Prime Minister Narendra Modi from official meetings, his handling of India-China relations, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, and references to riots and the condition of minorities.

HarperCollins India's own notice called the book a dramatic and deeply personal story of love, identity, duty and belonging and a rare insider's view of India's journey. The catalogue copy starts in Cambridge in 1965, when 19-year-old Sonia Maino met Rajiv Gandhi, and then moves back to a childhood in postwar Veneto and forward through her arrival in India, her years with Indira Gandhi's household, the assassinations of her mother-in-law and her husband, and her later life as Congress president and opposition leader.

Two publishers inside the same global group taking opposite decisions on the same manuscript is the oddity. Knopf in New York is printing the book. Penguin Random House India, owned by the same parent, is not, at least not under the deal that had been expected. HarperCollins now holds the Indian territory. Readers in India will get a text that, if the sourcing around the Penguin breach is right, still contains the passages about Modi, the RSS and China that the first Indian house wanted changed.

Gandhi has spent four decades as a public figure who rarely speaks at length in her own voice. A memoir written in that voice, issued in the middle of a third Modi term, is a political document whether or not it is sold as one. Congress figures treated Penguin India's retreat as proof of pressure. Penguin India's statement treated that charge as false. HarperCollins, by taking the book, has accepted whatever legal and commercial risk the first house was trying to edit down.

The November date is identical to Knopf's. That points to a coordinated global release rather than a hurried Indian substitute. Gandhi's representative on the deal is described as the wife of a former aide to Rajiv Gandhi and a family friend. The manuscript has been in motion long enough for a two-month argument with Penguin India and a clean handoff to a rival.

What the book can actually settle is limited. A memoir is one person's account. Official records of meetings with a sitting prime minister, and of the China file, will not be declassified on publication day. The value for readers is the private chronology: how a student from Orbassano became the keeper of a political family that has now spent two generations out of power at the Centre. The value for Congress is a hardback that can be waved in television debates. The value for the government is a target.

HarperCollins has published contentious political titles in India before. It knows the legal climate. The fact that it has put a date on the cover suggests its lawyers have read the pages Penguin India wanted cut and have decided they can stand behind them. On 10 November that decision becomes a book on a table. Until then the fight is over who was allowed to edit Sonia Gandhi, and who refused.