Kamala Harris stresses more her Indian lineage

I was bowled over with delight when Joe Biden selected Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate in the November 2020 presidential elections though she confronted him sharply in the Democratic primaries. We are far removed from the States but it is gratifying to have a half Asian woman selected to be the future VP. Our local papers ran articles about her but a recent article sent me, I felt, had to be shared with the readers of this column. It is by Jeffrey Gettleman and Suhasini Raj from Chennai with title: “How Kamala Harris’s Family in India Helped Shape Her Values” to which is added that her mother’s family defied stereotypes in India and promoted equality for women.

Senator Kamala Harris keeps her ties with her mother’s extended family very much alive and is said to be more Indian than Jamaican though classified a Black American. One of her brightest childhood memories is walking down the beach hand in hand with her Indian grandfather. During her visits from the United States, Kamala tagged along while the men discussed equal rights, corruption and the direction India was headed. “I remember the stories that they would tell and the passion with which they spoke about the importance of democracy,” Ms. Harris said in a 2018 speech to an Indian-American group. “As I reflect on those moments in my life that have had the most impact on who I am today – I wasn’t conscious of it at the time – it was those walks on the beach with my grandfather in Besant Nagar.” Although she has been recognized more as a Black woman than an Indian, her path to U.S. vice-presidential pick has recognized more her Indian origins. On her own admission, she has been guided by “the values of her Indian-born mother, her Indian grandfather and her wider Indian family who have provided a lifelong support network that endures even from 8,000 miles away.”

Shyamala Gopalan Harris

P.V. Gopalan, Kamala’s maternal grandfather, was born in 1911 in the small village Painganadu, south of Chennai, to a Brahmin family belonging to an elite subculture known as TamBrahms. Leaving the village, he served decades in the Indian government under the British and since independence and thus shifted to different parts of the subcontinent with his family. His eldest daughter of four – Shyamala – was bright, determined and with a fine voice that won her many singing prizes. She attended college in Delhi and studied home science. Her father had higher hopes. “What are you going to do with this home science degree, entertain guests?” he teased. So when she won admission to a Ph.D. programme at the University of California, Berkeley, to study nutrition and endocrinology (without anyone in the family knowing she had applied), he funded her gladly, firmly believing that girls too deserved higher education; progressive against conservative India of then.

Shyamala was only 19 when she arrived alone in Berkeley in 1959, and made a career as a breast cancer researcher. Few Indians lived in the United States at the time. Berkeley being a hive of political activity, she eagerly entered the civil rights movement, marching in protests and being attacked. She met Donald Harris, a graduate student from Jamaica who specialized in leftist economic theory. He was her first boyfriend. When the couple married, her parents offered their blessings; the interracial dimension didn’t bother them, her aunt and uncle said. Her mother was so proud she announced the marriage in The Illustrated Weekly of India.

The couple soon had two daughters: Kamala, (lotus in Sanskrit), and Maya, (illusion). But the relationship didn’t last. Her mother filed for divorce when Kamala was seven, but apparently did a wonderful job of being a single parent. For her it was important to maintain her Indian heritage, and thus the girls thrived on Hindu mythology and South Indian dishes of dosa and idli, and accompanied her to a Hindu kovil where she occasionally sang. She also stayed close to her parents and flew back every few years to Chennai where her parents had settled.

Kamala Harris explained this in her memoir, published last year: “My mother understood very well that she was raising two Black daughters. She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as Black girls.”

Shyamala Gopalam died in 2009 of breast cancer. Kamala carried her ashes to Chennai to fulfill her mother’s wish of them being scattered in the sea at Besant Nagar. Kamala has not visited her Indian home since then but keeps in touch with relatives.

Kamala Harris

Kamala was born on 20 October 1964. As a child she suffered a certain amount of discrimination due to her coloured parentage. Her mother, accepting a post in McGill University, shifted to Montreal, Quebec, with the two girls. Kamala graduated in 1981 from Howard University, Washington DC, and received her higher degree from Hastings College of Law, University of California in 1989. She joined the California Bar the next year. She served two terms as California’s Attorney General – 2010 and 2014 – and then succeeded in entering the US Senate in 2016. Her career rise has been meteoric and her concerns range from legal issues, peoples’ rights to the environment.

She married Douglas Ernhoff on 22 August 2014 and has two step children. They are members of the Third Baptist Church in San Francisco but Kamala has not severed connections with Hinduism.

Her uncle, G. Balachandran, who lives in New Delhi, recalled visiting Kamala in California about 15 years ago when she was San Francisco’s district attorney and was taking heat for her stance on certain issues. She rode them well. Thus her uncle’s comment: “She got that from her mother. Shyamala always taught her: ‘Don’t let anyone push you around.’”

During a later race for California attorney general, she called her aunt Sarala Gopalan in Chennai and asked her to break coconuts for good luck at a Hindu temple overlooking the beach at Besant Nagar. The aunt lined up 108 coconuts – an auspicious number in Hinduism – to be smashed. “And it takes a whole day to arrange that,” she said. Kamala won the election, by the slimmest of margins.

The reaction to her in India has been mixed. There has been excitement and front-page newspaper articles. But there has also been suspicion and detractors, especially since “She expressed concern about Kashmir, whose statehood India’s central government revoked last year. And she criticized India’s foreign minister after he refused to meet with an Indian-American congresswoman who was also critical about Kashmir.”

Notwithstanding this, there is pride across India of having one of her women becoming VP to the probable next President of the USA. Especially in Chennai. “We are not surprised she is being named the first woman of color on the presidential ticket of a major U.S. party. See, all the women in her family are strong personalities. These are women who know what they are talking and what they are saying.”

She had as a colleague Sri Lankan (Tamil) American Rohini Kosoglu who is now one of her advisors. Joe Biden is fairly old so he “may well be anointing Kamala Harris as his de facto leader of the party in four or eight years” and maybe, she will be the Democratic President of the US the next time around in 2024. Prez Trump has been scathing in his remarks on her saying she is terrible, while Obama is full of praise of her.