Kamala Harris and the Immigrant Story
by Sumita S. Chakravarty
Dr. Chakravarty, PhD is the founder of the Migration Mapping initiative and is currently working on a book titled Unsettled States: Towards a Media History of Migration.
By hiding a big part of your ethnicity, heritage, religion—you are practicing bigotry and bias, in a new form.
—Nitin Anand in My Voice (October 2020)
The selection of Ms. Harris represents at least a handful of firsts on a national presidential ticket: the first Black woman, the first Indian-American woman, the first daughter of immigrants, the first graduate of a historically Black college, the first member of an African-American sorority.
—Jennifer Medina & Evan Nicole Brown, The New York Times (August 12, 2020)
In late October of 2019, soon after Kamala Harris was selected to be Joe Biden’s running mate, a meme was found circulating in the digital realm. It showed Kamala in the guise of the Hindu goddess Durga with her ten arms holding various religious symbols, one of which plunges a spear into the demon Mahishasura who appears with the head of then-President Trump. Joe Biden’s head is photoshopped onto the body of the goddess’s vehicle or vahan, a roaring lion. This image, which has not been traced to a particular source, was tweeted by Meena Harris, Kamala’s niece, unleashing a storm of protest by Hindu groups who found the image offensive and insulting to their religious sensibilities. Although Meena Harris quickly took down her tweet, she did not apologize to these groups and was met with harsh criticism of her move. A year later, a day after the U.S. presidential inauguration ceremony held on Jan 20, 2021, I found this same image forwarded to my WhatsApp family chat group and doing rounds on the internet.
This is of course not the first time that an image has fueled controversy. In recent years, the furor over cartoons of the prophet Muhammed, the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, are grim reminders of the power of images to stir religious sentiment. At the same time, ascribing to a human being qualities associated with our pantheon of goddesses has long been part of the Hindu tradition. The birth of female children is welcomed in some households with the phrase, “Laxmi has arrived!” and a studious female child is complimented by being referred to as Saraswati, the goddess of learning. Powerful and wealthy men in India beg for protection from Durga who represents shakti or strength. Shrines in Hindu homes in India routinely have photos of departed family members next to images or figurines of gods and goddesses. The space between humans and their divinities is a shared space and communication always active, as shown in the way characters in countless Hindi films berate, coax, or implore a favorite goddess to come to their rescue and successfully orchestrate a turn of events. A Benjaminian “aura” or “ the unique phenomenon of a distance” is not the habitual mode of popular or folk Hinduism.
Coincidentally, many of the celebratory images of Harris’s nomination in her family’s south Indian village had a religious motif, and one report read, “’It’s quite obvious that the village people are hoping that once she wins this election she will do us some favors,’ explained R. R. Kalidas Vandayar, an elder. ‘We are hoping the prayers work’” (The New York Times).
Perhaps it is less the kitchy rendition of goddess and human in an online meme and more the feeling of what it means to be Indian (or retain “Indianness”) in a kaleidoscopic culture such as the United States that made Kamala Harris equally an icon and a lightning rod for certain constituencies. For the first time, Indian-Americans as a minority group have become aligned with political power in a visible way, and that can be both enervating and unfamiliar. And so the old litany of “true” belonging rears its atavistic head. Of Indian and Jamaican parentage, Harris was often reported to be less than forthcoming about her connections to the former. For instance, soon after her selection as Joe Biden’s running mate, the LA Times wrote, “She seldom delves into her Indian heritage, reflecting a broader reticence to share personal stories beyond a handful of well-worn anecdotes” (Los Angeles Times).
This strain was later echoed in the New York Times which noted, “Although Ms. Harris has been more understated about her Indian heritage than her experience as a Black woman, her path to U.S. vice-presidential pick has also been guided by the values of her Indian-born mother and her wider Indian family” (The New York Times).
The Guardian commented:
“On the campaign trail, Harris has brushed off questions about whether she was introspective about her heritage and race. In 2019, Harris said she did not agonize over how to categorize herself. “So much so,” Harris told the Washington Post in February 2019, “that when I first ran for office that was one of the things that I struggled with, which is that you are forced through that process to define yourself in a way that you fit neatly into the compartment that other people have created.” It quoted Harris as saying, “My point was: I am who I am. I’m good with it. You might need to figure it out, but I’m fine with it.”
The Guardian added, “On the campaign trail, Harris rarely discussed her thoughts on her racial heritage in detail, but she has frequently described her late mother, Shyamala Gopalan, who was born in India, as a mentor” (The Guardian).
The issue of belonging has always been an integral part of the immigrant story. The longing for the place left behind is a major trope of stories of movement and migration. The sentimentality associated with this sense of loss gave the narrative its poignancy and came to exert a powerful hold on the imagination. Maintaining ties to language, cultural traditions and belief-systems, not to speak of historical memory has sustained many an immigrant community. But “belonging” should be seen as an open-ended term. In lived experience, we find ourselves belonging in various ways, to various constituencies. One kind of belonging does not cancel out another, but enlarges the scope of our being in the world. In her memoir, Harris writes with deep affection about her mother and sister, but also of her professional and intellectual commitments to various people and organizations. Her objective may be to lay out her political positions, but what she is affirming is her recognition that we must create the world to which we seek to belong. And so, the comment made by Nitin Anand, that “Kamala Harris has often struggled with color and race politics, she has often been seen to shift her identity — juggling between Indian, Brown, Black, Hindu, Baptist Christian identities” (My Voice) refers to a kind of “juggling” that is increasingly a reality of our world, both as immigrants and as native-born Americans. It is a recognition of our multiplicity and hence a source of strength.
In this connection, a recent post by American journalist Anand Giridharadas is truly inspiring. On January 15, 2021, even as the country was reeling from a storming of the U.S. Capitol in Washington D.C. a week earlier, he reflected on this dark hour in American politics as stemming from an audacious experiment, the likes of which the world has never seen before. It is the attempt, and the reality, of struggling to build a system and a democracy of people who are literally from all over the world. There is no blueprint for this, says Giridharadas, no models. For nowhere else is anything similar happening: not in Europe, not in China, not in India — populous regions all. None of these is a nation of immigrants the way the United States has been. “To be a country of all the world, a country made up of all the countries, a country without a center of identity, without a default idea of what a human being is or looks like, without a shared religious belief, without a shared language that is people’s first language at home. And what we’re trying to do is awesome. It is literally awesome in the correct sense of that word” (The.Ink).
For too long the immigrant story has been about loss, separation, and nostalgia or about arrival and assimilation. It has been about making good, or going under. More recently, under political leaders like Trump and others, it has been about invaders and criminals against whom new armies of patriots are ready to do battle. But the truth is as usual far more complicated and history does not necessarily foretell the future. And so Giridharadas issues a kind of battlecry for a democracy of the “we” addressed to all Americans to tell the story “about something great we are trying to do.” Figures like Kamala Harris offer an encouraging and hopeful vision to which Indian-Americans and every other kind of American can hope to contribute.
Kamala Harris: The pictures that tell her story
By Guillermina Zabala
Guillermina Zabala is a multidisciplinary artist and educator whose art examines the intersection between the individual and their social-political-cultural environment. She’s currently a second year student in the MA in Media Studies Program at The New School. She has been selected as the first recipient of the Bishwanath and Sandhya Sinha Memorial Fellowship in Media Studies for the academic year 2020 – 2021.
The phrase “one picture is worth a thousand words” was first published in the San Antonio Light newspaper in 1918 as a modification of Henry Ibsen’s phrase “A thousand words leave not the same deep impression as does a single deed.” Since then, that phrase has become extremely popular, in particular when referring to photographs.
The increasing role of the Internet has contributed to the impact of images on our lives. Since these images have become part of our daily narrative and a reflection of our personal stories, it would be relevant to imagine that if “one picture is worth thousands words,” then “thousand pictures will be worth one million words.” Is it as simple as a math calculation or could it be that the overwhelming propagation of images through news and social media creates, actually, the reversed effect? In other words, less is more.
Take the image of the Vice President of the United States, Kamala Harris. Like many celebrities, her photograph can be found everywhere around the web, newspapers, social media, and more. The media has published her life story in pictures, describing her cultural heritage from both parents — her maternal side going all the way back to a small town in India and a paternal side with origins in Jamaica.
Out of the conglomeration of images published of her, there are three images that resonate because of their narrative and cultural context.
The first one is an old sepia photograph of young Kamala surrounded by her grandparents, mother, and sister Maya. Throughout her career, Harris has mentioned how much her mother and grandparents have inspired and supported her. This photograph encapsulates three generations in an instant and preserves the family’s heritage. Throughout history, immigrants have had the tendency to cherish and honor their ancestors. This image, in my opinion, reaffirms Kamala Harris’ immigrant lineage with dignity and pride. TIME magazine published a piece about her maternal cultural past. “Her maternal grandfather was born in the village of Thulasendrapuram, about 350 kilometers (215 miles) from the southern coastal city of Chennai.” “Many decades later, he moved to Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu state. Harris’ late mother was also born in India, before moving to the U.S. to study at the University of California. She married a Jamaican man, and they named their daughter Kamala, a Sanskrit word for ‘lotus flower.’”
Regarding her grandmother, who is also in the photograph (far right), Kamala said, “I come from a long line of tough, trailblazing, phenomenal women. My grandmother would go into villages in India with a bullhorn, telling poor women how to access birth control. My mother came to the United States at the age of 19 to study endocrinology at UC Berkeley and eventually became a leading breast cancer researcher” (Indian Express).
If there is one story the media has propagated widely is the story of Kamala’s mother, who has been a recurring theme in many of her speeches. According to an article in the Indian Express, on July 03, 2017, at a ceremony where 41 children and youth were being sworn in as U.S. citizens, she said, “Looking at this group, I can’t help but think of a young woman roughly the age of many of you. She was born in Chennai, in the south of India, where she had been a talented singer and a precocious student. And this young woman dreamed of becoming a scientist. She wanted to study at one of the top universities in the world, the University of California, Berkeley. She was only 19, but her father let her travel halfway around the world, with the agreement that when she finished school she would return home to a traditional Indian marriage.” Kamala continues with the story which has an unexpected ending. “But at Berkeley, this young woman met a young man, also an immigrant. A top economics student from Jamaica. And so, instead of an arranged marriage, she went against thousands of years of tradition and chose a love marriage. That woman was my mother, Shyamala Gopalan. It was a hard choice and a brave choice that she made, fuelled by love and optimism,” she said.
The second photograph is the one with Harris’ father Donald Harris and Kamala, a little girl, in his arms. This image represents her other cultural side of her family, from Jamaica and with African roots. Kamala remembers “My father, like so many Jamaicans, has immense pride in our Jamaican heritage and instilled that same pride in my sister and me,” Harris wrote. “We love Jamaica. He taught us the history of where we’re from, the struggles and beauty of the Jamaican people, and the richness of the culture” (Washington Post).
The third photograph is the one of Kamala posing for Vogue with her black Converse look. With a bit of a controversy (is this style vice-presidential?), this image represents Kamala now. She’s hip, independent, confident and, most importantly, a powerful figure who has kept a very approachable and down-to-earth attitude throughout her career and presidential campaign. Robin Givhan at The Washington Post described it as “an audacious way of depicting this new political era and its break with the past.” The question is, how much of this image is authentic and how much is fabricated? Even Kamala, who has shown that family values are her priority, is, probably, being advised about her image. Due to the increasing criticism, Vogue decided to publish a second cover in which Kamala wears a suit and crosses her arms, on an all more “vice-presidential” look. This is, apparently, how a powerful female leader demonstrates to the world that she’s now the first ever female Vice President of the United States of America.
