A few weeks
ago, when Kamala Harris, an African- American
announced her entry into the 2020 US presidential race, there
was a lot of excitement in India, because of her India/Chennai connection.
When she was first sworn in as a Democratic senator from California in 2017, she became only the second
African-American woman to serve in the Senate. Kamala was also the first woman
elected as District Attorney of San Francisco and the first person of South
Asian descent to become Attorney General of California. Those are just a few of
her inspiring firsts. But this article is not about her achievements but about
her India/Chennai connection.
Kamala`s mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was the daughter of
P. V. Gopalan, a Tambrahm, who was active in the Indian independence
movement and then became a high-ranking civil servant who fought against
corruption. Later he acted as an adviser to newly independent nations,
including Zambia. Her mother, Rajam Gopalan, who was married at 16, grew into a self-assured woman who used her
position in the society to advocate for
less advantaged women. During the 1940s, Rajam would drive around in her
Volkswagen bug with a bullhorn, telling poor women how to access birth control.
“My grandfather would joke that his wife`s community activism would be the end
of his career,” Kamala wrote in her book, Smart on Crime. No wonder Kamala
has activism in her genes. Her mother liked to recount the time when Kamala ,
then a toddler, was fussing and, when asked what she wanted, cried out, “Freedom!”
As a child, Kamala
frequently visited her extended family in the Besant Nagar neighborhood
of Chennai, where her grandfather
had settled down post retirement.. Kamala grew up going to both a black Baptist church and a Hindu temple.[She
has one younger sister, Maya , a former Vice-President at Ford Foundation who was
a part of Hillary Clinton's election
campaign.
Kamala
and Maya, were raised by their Indian mother, in a black neighborhood during
the Civil Rights movement, which helped shape Kamala`s African American identity.
It seems Kamala`s mother was a very strong woman, very hardworking,
very intelligent. After doing her graduation in home science in Delhi, she went
to America for higher studies in 1957-58. She got her Masters and a PhD. Later she became a scientist who worked on breast cancer. She
had done a lot of research on cancer and was quite well known in that field. She
met Dr Donald Harris, a Jamaican American and married him in 1963. Kamala was
born in 1964, the first grandchild in the family.
Kamala`s parents divorced when she was seven, and her
mother was granted custody of the children by court-ordered settlement.[ After the divorce, her mother moved
with the children to Montreal, Québec, Canada
before returning to USA to pursue a career in cancer research.
Kamala graduated from Montreal's Westmount High School in
Québec after which she attended Howard University in
Washington, D.C., where she majored in political science and economics. At Howard, Kamala was elected to the
liberal arts student council as freshman class representative and was also a member of the debate team. She returned to California, where she earned her Juris Doctor (J.D.)
from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, in 1989. She was
admitted to the State Bar of California in
1990. Thus began a legal career in which she was to excel in whatever job she
undertook and become a trailblazer.
Though Kamala was born and brought up in
America, her mother Shyamala had
inculcated in her South Indian culture and values. Shyamala was a true South Indian in all aspects and
loved South Indian food. That is why her daughters also like South Indian food.
Kamala believes in going to the temple
because her mother believed in it. According to her extended family in Chennai,
Kamala is what she is today because of her mother.
Kamala
married Douglas Emhoff, a Jewish
attorney from Los Angeles, a few years
ago at the age of 49. This was her first
marriage while he has two kids from his previous marriage. The extended
family from Chennai was there to celebrate the day. As she got married to a
Jewish American who is also a lawyer, there was a Jewish ceremony as well as an
Indian ceremony with mangalsutra etc. T he wedding was a family affair
with her close family and friends attending it. There was special vegetarian
food for the guests from India at the
feast as Kamala knew that her family
members from India ate only vegetarian food.
Kamala has another connection with Chennai; with
Lord Ganesha at a temple in Adyar. Before the primary a few years ago, she had called her aunt and said, 'Chithi, please
pray for me, break coconuts at the temple.'
So Dr Sarala Gopalan, her mother`s younger
sister who is a consultant at Voluntary
Health Services in Chennai , broke 108
coconuts at the Ganesha temple where Kamala`s mother had once been a committee
member when it was first set up.
After she was elected attorney general,
Kamala called her aunt and said, 'Your
coconuts worked, Chithi. For every coconut you broke, I got 1,000 votes.'
Dubbed as the "female Obama", the press is
already touting her as the potential first woman President for the 2020 election. If she becomes a leading
contender for Democrat presidential nominee she may once again choose to
foreground her black identity to appeal to the coalition that voted Obama to
power.
Let us wish Kamala Harris, with her family`s roots in Chennai,
all the best in her dream of becoming the First `Indian-African-American` Woman
President of USA.
This article has appeared
in the Madras Musings Issue dt. 1-15th April,2019.
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