Kamala Harris today accepted the Democratic presidential nomination in Chicago and remembered her Indian-origin mother Shyamala Gopalan Harris in front of a cheering crowd. Taking the main stage on the final day of the Democratic Party convention, she said her mother was only 19 when she crossed the world alone, travelling from India to California, “with an unwavering dream of becoming a scientist who could cure breast cancer”.
“My mother, Shyamala Harris, had such a woman. I miss her every day — especially now. And I know she’ll be looking down tonight and smiling,” she told the crowd in Chicago.
Ms. Harris said, “…we were raised primarily by my mother. She rented a small apartment in the East Bay before she could finally afford to buy a house. In the Bay, you either live in the hills or on flatland. We lived in the flats – a lovely working-class neighborhood of firefighters, nurses and construction workers, all of whom tended their lawns with pride.”
Shyamala Gopalan Harris was a breast cancer specialist who came from Tamil Nadu in 1960 to pursue a doctorate in endocrinology at the University of California, Berkeley.
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“When she finished school, she was supposed to return home for a traditionally arranged marriage, but as fate would have it, she met my father, Donald Harris, who was also a student in Jamaica. They fell in love and got married, and that step of self-determination brought my sister Maya and me together,” Ms Harris said in her speech.
Kamala’s sister Maya Harris also spoke at the Chicago event and recalled how her mother came to the US from India in search of a better life and encouraged her daughters to be “authors of their own stories”.
“Mummy’s journey, and the opportunities she sought for Kamala and me — it’s a uniquely American story,” he said.
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She also shared that if her late mother were here, she would say how proud she was of her daughter. Then, “Without any delay, she would say, ‘That’s enough. You have to work.'”
Kamala Harris’s India connection
59-year-old Kamala Harris was born in Oakland, California in 1964. Her father was Donald Harris, an African-Jamaican who came to the US to study economics. Her mother’s name was Shyamala Gopalan.
His parents met at the University of California, which was a center of student activism during the Civil Rights Movement.
Donald Harris is a professor emeritus at Stanford University, while Shyamala Gopalan died of cancer on February 11, 2009, a year before Kamala was elected as California’s attorney general.
After the divorce, Shyamala Gopalan raised Kamala and her younger sister Maya.
Kamala wrote in her 2019 book, “The Truths We Hold,” that she took him on trips to India and often expressed affection or frustration in Tamil.
Kamala Harris has often talked about her connections with India and the influence of her maternal grandfather PV Gopalan.
P.V. Gopalan left Tamil Nadu’s Thulasendrapuram village decades ago, but residents say the family has maintained close ties with him and has regularly donated for the maintenance of the temple.
Earlier today, Kamala Harris formally accepted the Democratic Party’s 2024 presidential nomination, in which she will contest against her Republican rival Donald Trump. Ms Harris emerged as the Democratic candidate after President Joe Biden, 81, was forced to drop out of the White House race last month. If she succeeds, she will become America’s first female president.
