Sagarika Ghose’s spellbinding portrait of Indira Gandhi excavates both the Iron Lady and the flesh-and-blood woman. Here’s an extract from the book.

She was a James Bond in khadi. A female ‘bahubali’. But the fierce ambitions of India’s most powerful female politician, Indira Gandhi were seeded in the thought that she was a boy. She signed early letters to her father as Indu-Boy. Her father called her ‘soldier boy’. As an adult, and later as a politician, […]