The most important person in your life.
This is how it defines Kamala Harris to his mother, Shyamala Gopalana woman who emigrated from India in the late 1950s, when she was barely 19 years old, and who was a great influence and inspiration for the Democratic candidate for the presidency of the United States.
In practically all of her interventions, speeches or interviews, the US vice president has a memory or an anecdote in which her mother is the protagonist.
He attributes the phrase to her “You can be the first to do many things, but make sure you are not the last.”alluding to the achievements and “first times” that the current US vice president has achieved throughout her career.
Sometimes, in the big moments of his life, Harris is moved when he thinks about his mother, clearly longing to be by her side.
“My mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, was a force of nature and the greatest source of inspiration in my life”Harris wrote on Instagram in 2020.
“She taught my sister, Maya, and me the importance of hard work and believing in our power to right what is wrong.”
“When my mother came here from India at age 19, maybe she didn’t imagine this moment,” Harris said upon assuming the role of vice president in January 2021.
“But she believed deeply in an America where a moment like this would be possible.”
On that occasion, Harris made history by becoming the first woman and the first black and Asian American to assume the vice presidency of the United States.
And now he hopes to go one step further: be the first president of the country.
A young emigrant
The story of Harris’ rise could not be written if it were not for the daring journey her mother made in 1958, when she came to the US from India to pursue her dreams.
Shyamala Gopalan, who was just over 1.5 meters tall, was the eldest of the four children of a senior civil servant and a housewife.
R. Rajaraman, Gopalan’s classmate when they were teenagers, described her as “an unusual person.”
In her class of 40 students, girls and boys sat on separate sides of the classroom and there was little interaction between the genders.
“But she wasn’t ashamed to talk to boys. “She was confident in herself,” he recalled.
Gopalan graduated in Home Science from Lady Irwin College in New Delhi, a college that in those days was known “as a place that specialized in preparing girls for marriage, to be good wives“.
“My father and I used to make fun of her,” Gopalan Balachandran, Shyamala’s brother, told the BBC a few years ago.
“We asked him, ‘What do they teach you there?’ How to set the table? Where to put the spoon?’ “She got very angry with us.”
Indeed, Gopalan aspired for higher education and, with his father’s blessing, traveled to Berkeley, California.
“My father had no problem with her going abroad, although he was worried because we didn’t know anyone in the U.S. But he believed in the importance of education and he let her go,” Harris’ uncle said.
Thus, the young Gopalan left India to a country she had never visited and where she did not know anyone, to carry out a doctorate in nutrition and endocrinology.
Kamala Harris wrote about her mother’s journey in her autobiographical book The Truths We Hold: An American Journey (translated into Spanish as “Our truth”), published in 2019.
“It’s hard for me to imagine how hard it must have been for her parents to let her go,” he wrote.
“Commercial airline travel was just beginning to spread around the world. It wouldn’t be easy to keep in touch. However, when my mother asked permission to move to California, my grandparents did not stand in the way.”
In the decades since, Gopalan gained recognition for her breast cancer research.
He published more than 100 research articles in academic journals and raised $4.76 million in grants for his work.
Convinced activist
Shyamala Gopalan came to the US at an interesting time.
The civil rights movement was at its peak and Berkeley was at the center of protests against racial discrimination.
Like many other foreign students, Gopalan joined the fight to make the US, and the world, a better place.
“My mother had grown up in a home where political activism and civic leadership came naturally,” Harris wrote in her memoir.
“From my two grandparents, my mother developed a keen political awareness. He was aware of the history, aware of the struggle, aware of the inequities. He was born with a sense of justice imprinted in his soul”.
However, participating in the civil rights movement was unusual for a student from India at that time.
Margot Dashiell, who met her in 1961 on campus, said, “I had the feeling that she could personally identify with the struggles that black students were processing and facing, because she came from a society that knew the oppression of colonialism.”
Friends describe her as “a small person” who was “a bright, eloquent, assertive and intellectually sharp student“.
No one questioned her presence in a circle that was almost exclusively black, recalled Aubrey LaBrie, who met Gopalan in 1962 in Berkeley and formed a lifelong friendship with her.
“We were all interested in the development of the civil rights movement in this country. Of course, we saw it as part of the liberation movements of the [entonces llamado] Third World and I suppose that was the basis of his participation in this group.”
Donald Harris, Kamala’s father
It was his activism that changed the course of his life.
Harris says her mother was expected to return to India after completing her education and have an arranged marriage, as were her parents, “but fate had other plans.”
In 1962, Shyamala Gopalan met Donald Harris, who had come to California from Jamaica to study economics at Berkeley, at a gathering of black students where she came to introduce herself.
As Harris tells it in his autobiography, his parents “fell in love while marching together for justice and civil rights.”
They married in 1963, and a year later, at the age of 25, Gopalan earned her doctorate and gave birth to Kamala Devi. Two years later, Maya Lakshmi, the couple’s second daughter, arrived.
Devi is the Hindu mother goddess. Lakshmi is the lotus goddess of wealth, beauty and good fortune.
Gopalan told Los Angeles Times in 2004 that she gave her daughters names derived from Indian mythology to help preserve her cultural identity.
“A culture that worships goddesses produces strong women”he expressed.
Harris says her parents used to take her to protests in a stroller.
The marriage between Shyamala and Donald did not last long. The couple separated when Harris was 5, and although she and her sister visited their father during the holidays, their mother basically raised them on her own.
She worked day and night, conducting cutting-edge cancer research while caring for her daughters.
Brilliant scientist
Gopalan, who died in February 2009 at age 70 from colon cancer, achieved global recognition for making important discoveries about the role of hormones in breast cancer.
He began his career researching at Berkeley’s Department of Zoology and its Cancer Research Laboratory, then worked in France, Italy, and Canada, before returning to the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California for the last decade of his work.
Joe Gray, a scientist and Gopalan’s boss at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, described her as “a very serious researcher, very willing to participate in scientific exchange during discussions.”
Gray noted that she was very open about her own cancer diagnosis. “He just said, ‘This is it and I’m going to keep going as long as I can.’”
According to his brother’s story, as his cancer spread, Gopalan decided to return to India to spend the end of his life in the comforting company of his mother and family.
But It was a trip that was never made.
Learning for Kamala Harris
In addition to the affection and gratitude that Harris expresses when he talks about his mother, the admiration and respect he feels for her are evident, attributing to her a deep commitment to service towards others.
“She was tough, brave and a pioneer in the fight for women’s health,” Harris exclaimed during the Democratic National Convention last August.
But he also recognizes that he was firm and demanding with her and her sister.
“My mother understood very well that she was raising two black daughters,” Harris wrote in her autobiography.
From her, she says, she learned to not give up, to get up after every fall, to take charge of her life and take responsibility for setbacks and mistakes.
“My mother taught us that we had the capacity for action and reaction, that things don’t just happen to you,” Harris explained in a recent interview for the podcast Call Her Daddy.
“If he came home with a problem, the first thing he would do was look at me and say, ‘What did you do?’ “He taught me to reflect on what my options were, to take charge of the moment.”
“’You decide how to react, don’t let let no one take away your power’, that was the great lesson he gave me.”
* With additional reporting by Geeta Pandey in New Delhi and Vineet Khare in Washington DC.
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