Power Abroad: Kamala Harris and the long road from Thulasendrapuram

A marriage of movements

At Berkeley, in the ferment of the early civil-rights era, Shyamala met Donald Harris, a Jamaican economics student. Their daughter Kamala Devi Harris was born in Oakland in 1964, into a household that straddled two freedom struggles and two continents. The marriage did not last, and Kamala and her sister Maya were raised largely by their mother — a single Indian immigrant woman determined, Shyamala once said, to raise two confident Black daughters who also knew exactly where their other half came from.

The Indian thread

That Indian half was no afterthought. Harris grew up eating South Indian food and hearing her mother speak Tamil, and was taken on childhood visits to Chennai to see her grandfather, whose long morning walks and talk of public duty she would later credit as a formative influence. In her 2020 convention speech she invoked her chithis — the Tamil word for the aunts who are a mother's younger sisters — sending a small electric jolt of recognition through Tamil households worldwide. In the village of Thulasendrapuram, her maternal ancestral home, her name still appears on a temple donor board.

The American ascent

Harris built her career, though, as an African-American woman in American public life. She attended Howard University, one of the country's historically Black colleges, and rose through California law as a prosecutor, then District Attorney of San Francisco and Attorney General of the nation's largest state. Elected to the US Senate in 2016, she became a national figure, and in 2020 Joe Biden chose her as his running mate.

The diaspora's pride

Her victory set off celebrations in India. Her ancestral village burst firecrackers and offered prayers for the "daughter of this land"; Indian-Americans, long among the most successful and least politically visible of US immigrant groups, saw one of their own a heartbeat from the presidency. For a community whose story in America had been largely one of doctors, engineers and entrepreneurs rather than politicians, it was a watershed.

The identity question

Harris's heritage also drew a more complicated conversation. She has most often identified, politically and personally, as Black and African-American, the identity in which she was raised and built her career — and some Indian-Americans wished she leaned more visibly into the Indian half of her story. Others saw in her exactly the modern reality of the diaspora: a woman who was wholly Indian and wholly Black and wholly American at once, refusing to be filed under a single label.

The run for the top

In July 2024, after President Biden withdrew from the race late in the campaign, Harris became the Democratic Party's nominee for President — the first woman of Indian descent ever to lead a major American party's ticket. Her candidacy electrified her supporters and compressed a national campaign into a few extraordinary months.

November 2024

It was not enough. In the November 2024 election Harris lost to Donald Trump, who returned to the White House. Her bid for the presidency ended in defeat, and her term as Vice President concluded in January 2025.

The legacy

The milestone, though, is permanent. The daughter of a Tamil cancer researcher who had sailed from Madras to Berkeley in 1958 rose to become Vice President of the United States and a major party's nominee for its highest office. Shyamala Gopalan, who died in 2009, did not live to see it. But the arc she began — one young woman, one ocean, one suitcase of ambition — reached almost to the very top of American power, and redrew what an Indian-American life could aspire to be.