Two days after its November 10 release, curiosity about the memoir—which HarperCollins published in India after Penguin Random House India stepped away from the project—remains high, with readers still seeking copies, whether through pirated PDFs or bookstores.
‘The biggest frenzy so far’
Bamhi said he last saw this kind of excitement as a child, when Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows came out. “I remember 7 am in the morning there was a queue outside the shop, and people were excited about the book. They were waiting for it for months. After that, this is the first time I’m seeing such an excitement for a book amongst readers.” Nothing else in recent years, including Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me, has come close, he said.
Aakash Gupta CEO of Crossword Bookstores, which has 150 stores in 47 cities, went further. “Nothing can compare to Harry Potter… but the biggest frenzy we probably saw so far is Sonia Gandhi,” he said, ranking it above this year’s launches of Odyssey, Dune and Sarah J. Maas’s latest.
The launch was a logistics exercise for the chain. Under a strict embargo, no carton could be opened before 10 am. Crossword had the book on shelves at 10 am in more than 100 stores, Gupta said, with the rest stocked later that day or the next after transport delays in some cities. In many stores, readers were waiting outside at opening.
The chain had between 1,000 and 2,000 pre-orders on its website, has placed two reorders and is “inching towards the 8,000 mark, Gupta said. He expects sales to cross 10,000 in the coming week. Demand has been strongest in urban stores and in the north, which he described as “more politically inclined”, though the book has also done well in Kerala.
Outside Delhi, Champaka bookstore in Bengaluru reported steady interest and a few pre-orders.
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Who is buying
At ₹1,299, the hardcover is hardly an impulse buy. “There are a lot of youngsters who are coming to buy it, but some of them see the price, and they leave it there,” Bamhi said. “They’ll take it later, or from some other source.” The buyers, he said, are mostly between 25 and 40 — “working individuals, corporate people, lawyers mostly” — along with some older readers.
One of them, Supreme Court advocate Akbar Khan, picked up a copy at Bahrisons in Khan Market. He described Gandhi as an “iron lady” who had faced years of criticism. “Society should learn how an Italian lady came from her country to India and accepted the culture. That is a very difficult task,” he said.
Bamhi also credited the political mood among younger Indians. “Everybody is actively involved in the political space. Even if they’re not physically going to a place, at least mentally they are,” he said. “It has helped create the environment for the book.”
Such interest in an autobiography has been unprecedented in India. Political memoirs are a major category in the West, says Gupta, but rare in India, especially from politicians at the very top. “This is a book that everybody was waiting for, to hear it from the horse’s mouth.”
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The ₹450 question
The Blinkit listing — ₹849 against an MRP of ₹1,299 — has not gone unnoticed by booksellers.
“It doesn’t make any economic sense. Why devalue something?” Gupta said, suggesting quick-commerce platforms may be using the book as a loss leader. “The value of this book is much more than ₹1,299… We’re not treating books like commodities.”
He added that the discounting was not affecting Crossword, which sometimes works with quick-commerce companies itself. “We are in a free market economy. We cannot stop anybody doing anything.”
For an independent store, the view is starker. “We can’t help it,” Bamhi said. “They are big giants. Independent bookshops don’t have a say when it comes to these multinational giants. It is just something we live with, and we are dependent on and grateful for our regular customers who want to support bookshops.”
Blinkit did not respond to queries about the pricing.
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The PDF in circulation
There is also a free version. Pankaj P Singh, owner of Browser bookstore in Chandigarh, said a pirated PDF of the book, without a watermark, is widely circulating.
Yet people are still buying in large numbers, he said, because however widely the PDF has spread, not everybody has it — and for a book like this, price is not a consideration. But he expects the rush to be short-lived. “This is the kind of book that becomes an immediate talking point,” he said. “Sales are likely to dwindle over the next few weeks.”
HarperCollins India did not respond to queries on the pirated copy or on quick-commerce discounting.
Moment or market?
Booksellers are enjoying the queues while they last. With the Harry Potter TV series arriving in December, Gupta is already hoping for another flood of customers. “Harry Potter was a bookstore phenomenon,” he said. “Half the thing about Harry Potter was coming to the stores.” For a few days this week, Sonia Gandhi’s memoir has been one too.
