Legend Of The Renunciate

Sonia Gandhi’s story is extraordinary on every level. Fairytales do no justice.

- Shashi Tharoor

A novelist, seeking to tell the story of Sonia Gandhi, might be forgiven for seeing a fairytale element in the narrative. Beautiful foreigner comes to strange new land and marries handsome prince. They enjoy years of bliss, until the prince is obliged, in painful circumstances, to take over the kingdom, and discovers the harsh realities of ruling a turbulent realm, culminating in the unspeakable tragedy of his own assassination. The queen retreats into silence and mourning, until the insistent supplications of her courtiers compel her to emerge and take the destiny of the kingdom into her hands. Bliss to triumph to tragedy to triumph again—a classic tale: I should have begun this foreword with the words “Once Upon A Time.”

And yet—there is a twist in the tale. For the queen, offered the crown on a brocade cushion, turns it down. She prefers to remain behind the throne, walking with the common peasantry, rallying the people but leaving power in the hands of her grey-haired viziers. They don’t write fairytales like that, not even for the woman once dubbed by an unkind observer the “Cinderella of Orbassano.”