Who is Shyamala Gopalan? Kamala Harris invokes her Indian mother in DNC speech

When Kamala Harris talks about her South Asian identity, it’s usually in the context of her mother, Shyamala Gopalan. The same was true Thursday night during Harris’ speech on the fourth night of the Democratic National Convention.

Gopalan, who died in 2009, left an indelible mark on the vice president, immersing her in Indian culture and social activism from an early age. 

“My mother was 19 when she crossed the world alone, traveling from India to California with an unshakable dream,” Harris said in her speech at the convention. “She taught us to never complain about injustice but to do something about it.”

Gopalan was born and raised in the South Indian city of Chennai (then called Madras). A grandfather was a civil servant and a proponent of India’s freedom from the British. Gopalan had a similar activist bent. After she moved to the Bay Area at 19 years old and enrolled in the University of California, Berkeley, she became involved in the Civil Rights Movement. 

Gopalan earned her doctorate by age 25 and went on to become a prominent breast cancer researcher. At Berkeley, she met Harris’ father, Donald Harris, whom she married in 1963 and divorced in 1971. 

Harris says that despite her mother’s success, her life as a new immigrant was often marred by racism. 

“My mother was a brilliant 5-foot-tall brown woman with an accent,” Harris said in her speech. “As the eldest child, I saw how the world would sometimes treat her. But my mother never lost her cool.”

She also gets the credit for one of Harris’ most famous sound bites. 

“She would say to us: ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you,’” Harris said in a speech last year, leading to a flurry of memes and viral TikTok audios.  

Harris began to emphasize her racial identity more when she launched her first presidential campaign in 2019. She explained how her mother’s roots gave India a special place in her life. She grew up eating traditional South Indian food and listening to her mother speak Tamil. 

“Our classical Indian names harked back to our heritage, and we were raised with a strong awareness of and appreciation for Indian culture,” she wrote in her memoir. “All of my mother’s words of affection or frustration came out in her mother tongue — which seems fitting to me since the purity of those emotions is what I associate with my mother most of all.”

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Harris says that she visited India frequently as a child and that her walks with her progressive grandfather formed her early political consciousness. She has continued to use her South Asian heritage as a touchstone in recent years, even having recorded a video making a typical South Indian dish, masala dosa, with actor Mindy Kaling. 

But despite that, she says, her mother raised her with the understanding that she and her sister would move through the world as Black women. She said in a 2015 interview that she grew up going to both a Black Baptist church and a Hindu temple. 

“My mother understood very well that she was raising two Black daughters,” she wrote in her memoir. “She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as Black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud Black women.”

Harris attended Howard University, a prominent historically Black university in Washington, D.C. There, she joined Alpha Kappa Alpha, the oldest Black Greek-lettered sorority. 

She isn’t quick to talk about facing racism growing up, saying in the 2015 interview, “I don’t feel compelled to sing long ballads about my experiences with injustice.”

Similarly, she doesn’t always clap back when Donald Trump and others on the right invoke her race or question the authenticity of her identity. 

“I’m Black, and I’m proud of being Black,” she said on “The Breakfast Club” podcast in 2020. “I was born Black. I will die Black, and I’m not going to make excuses for anybody because they don’t understand.”

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