Power Abroad: Kamala Harris and the long road from Thulasendrapuram
The first person of Indian descent to reach the US vice-presidency owed her path, by her own account, to a 19-year-old from Madras who crossed the world alone to become a scientist.
When Kamala Harris was sworn in as Vice-President of the United States in January 2021, a village in Tamil Nadu set off firecrackers. Thulasendrapuram, a few hundred people in the rice country south of Chennai, was where her grandfather had been born — and where, in the temple, her name had been carved on a list of donors. Harris had reached the second-highest office in American politics. The diaspora claimed the moment as its own.
The 19-year-old from Madras
The Indian half of Harris's story runs through her mother. Shyamala Gopalan was born in Chennai on 7 December 1938, into a Tamil Brahmin family. Her father, P. V. Gopalan, was a civil servant; the household prized education and public service in equal measure. At nineteen, Shyamala did something almost unheard of for an Indian woman of her generation: she crossed the world alone, travelling from India to the University of California, Berkeley, to study nutrition and endocrinology. Her ambition was specific — to become a scientist who would help cure breast cancer — and she largely achieved it.
At Berkeley, in the ferment of the early 1960s civil-rights movement, she met Donald Harris, a Jamaican graduate student in economics. Kamala was born in Oakland in 1964; her sister Maya followed. The marriage did not last, and the girls were raised primarily by their mother.
Raised "with a strong awareness"
Harris has been careful, across her career, to hold both halves of her inheritance. She grew up, she has written, eating South Indian food and listening to her mother speak Tamil; she visited her grandparents in Besant Nagar in Madras. In her memoir she recalls that "our classical Indian names harked back to our heritage, and we were raised with a strong awareness of and appreciation for Indian culture." She has also spoken, often and powerfully, of being raised a Black woman in America, of attending Howard University, of her years in the Black church.
Critics on both sides have at times demanded she choose — that she is "not really" Indian, or "not really" Black. The diaspora that celebrated her tended to reject the premise. Shyamala Gopalan's daughter was the product of exactly the kind of border-crossing that makes a diaspora in the first place.
What the moment meant
For Indian-Americans, Harris's rise was the clearest sign yet that the community had moved from the professions into the highest reaches of public power. Indians had long been America's most successful immigrant group by income and education; now one of their own was a heartbeat from the presidency, and in 2024 the Democratic nominee for it. That she did not win that election does not diminish the arc. A generation earlier, the ceiling for an Indian-American in politics was a congressional seat in a safe district. Harris pushed it to the top.
The deeper point is about the mother, not the daughter. Shyamala Gopalan got on a plane at nineteen, alone, with a scientific ambition and no safety net, in an era when neither her gender nor her nationality made the journey easy. The vice-presidency was, in a real sense, the second-generation dividend on that first reckless crossing. It is the story of the diaspora in miniature: the first generation takes the impossible risk, and a generation or two later, a village in Tamil Nadu lets off firecrackers because one of its own is being sworn in halfway around the world.
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