September 20, 2024 — Dr. Vishakha N. Desai, President Emerita of Asia Society and Former Senior Advisor for Global Affairs to the President of Columbia University, writes about Kamala Harris as a third-generation woman in a long line of female activists.

After the Presidential debate, commentators remarked on how Vice President Kamala Harris came alive when she answered the question about women’s abortion rights. As she spoke passionately about the disastrous consequences of the repeal of Roe vs. Wade, her two sides—a caring feminist, and a relentless fighter for social justice—came together. This was not always so. Prior to the Democratic convention, most Americans, if they knew her at all, thought of her as a tough prosecutor and a senator with a penchant for hard-edged questioning. They were surprised to learn about the softer side of Ms. Harris as speaker after speaker at the convention talked about how Harris called them in their time of trouble or offered to help them as they were starting out. At the debate, she became much more authentic when she could combine these two sides of herself together. I would argue that this is a direct result of her Indian lineage going back two generations.

For Ms. Harris, these two qualities are actually embedded in her full name: Kamala Devi. Kamala in Sanskrit means lotus (one of my favorite campaign merchandise items reads “Lotus for POTUS” with Kamala’s face between the two words) and Devi stands for goddess. The lotus—which features prominently in all ancient Indian religions including Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism—symbolizes beauty, compassion and the capacity to rise through the mud and emerge unscathed by it. Devi, on the other hand, is synonymous with the Shakti or energy, often referring to the powerful Goddess Durga. She is a female divinity who slays demons when no male god is capable of doing the job. Not simply an appendage to her male partner, Devi stands independently, forcefully confronting the dark forces of society for the sake of maintaining balance and order.

Interestingly, it was also the name of one of the most prominent women leaders in India’s independence movement. Kamala Devi Chattopadhyay, born in southern India, was a fearless leader who convinced Gandhi at the age of 27 to include women in the famous Salt March in 1930 which catapulted the Satyagraha (“truth force”) on the world stage. Gloria Steinem has cited Ms. Chattopadhyay as one of her early mentors. Coming from a family of social activists, Dr. Shyamala Harris, also from a South Indian family, and now well-known as the mother of the Democratic nominee for President, must have selected the name for her daughter with an awareness of the power of the two words “Kamala” and “Devi” put together. Frequent references to the Indian immigrant mother, from Michelle Obama to Kamala’s sister Maya and from the candidate herself, have made it clear that Kamala is her mother’s daughter; a determined leader and a loving friend, fiercely committed to her community as well as the cause of social justice in America.

In many ways, the story of Dr. Harris reminds me of the life journey of my own mother, from a generation that came before. An active freedom fighter in India’s independence movement, and a co-founder of one of the earliest women’s organizations in India, my mother Nirmala left her hometown at the age of seventeen (after a breakup of her impending arranged marriage) in 1931 to go to college in a city where she knew no one. She met my father from a different caste in the independence movement and after a seven-year courtship they got married in 1945, feeling confident that India’s independence from the British was coming soon. In stark contrast to the globally popular lavish Indian weddings of today, their ceremony consisted of a simple gathering officiated by a leader in the movement, my mother wearing the hand-spun cotton woven by my father in a British jail, with flowers in her hair. Our mother was 31 when she got married, unthinkable in India then, and even now. A strong independent professional woman, Nirmala proceeded to become a mother of seven children, always reminding all of us, especially the four girls, that marriage for a woman was a choice, not a foregone conclusion. She was both an anchor for the family and a fierce advocate for women’s rights. And she was hardly alone in the India of her time.

My mother was the same age as Kamala’s grandmother Rajam Gopalan, who, as an activist “traveled across India—bullhorn in hand—to talk to women about accessing birth control” as described by Ms. Harris. It is not surprising then that Shyamala Harris was an active participant in the civil rights movement in the United States. It seems only natural that as a single mother, she implored her two daughters “to do something” rather than just be passive complainers. Like her mother and my mother, Dr. Harris was a strong independent woman and a committed mother. For her, the traits of compassion and care mixed effortlessly with ideas of a smart woman as an active player in society.

Shyamala understood that in the United States of the early 1960s, there was little discussion of diversity that went beyond the binary divisions of Black and white. She knew that her biracial daughters would be categorized as Black and made sure that they understood how to create their own identity within that context. Dr. Harris made a point of creating a community that included strong Black women who looked out for each other and worked hard to instill a sense of purpose in their kids.

So, let’s understand that Kamala Harris is a third-generation woman in a long line of female activists whose sense of family, community, society, and purpose has been strengthened by her close attachment to the Black community from her childhood days. If young Kamala learned the powerful lessons of “doing something” and “not letting others define your identity” from her immigrant mother, she developed a sense of her complex multi-racial identity as an American through her experiences in and connection with the Black community where strong women provided maternal support to each other. That is a true American story.

An educator, an institutional leader, and an immigrant par excellence, the late Vartan Gregorian used to say that every immigrant who comes to these shores learns to be an American, and in the process, expands the definition of what it means to be American. Only in America can a daughter and granddaughter of strong Indian women, raised with the help surrogate Black mothers, be in a position to become the leader of the country.  As she gets to the finish line with the grace of a lotus and the energy of a goddess, Kamala Devi Harris, a proud American of dual heritage can make visible the ideal of America. That is something to celebrate. 

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Asia Society.

Dr. Vishakha N. Desai is the former Senior Advisor for Global Affairs to the President of Columbia University and a former Senior Research Scholar for the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. From 2004 through 2012, Dr. Desai served as President and CEO of the Asia Society. Under her leadership the society expanded the scope and scale of its activities with the opening of new offices in India and Korea, a new center of U.S.-China Relations, internationally recognized education programs, and inauguration of two new architecturally distinguished facilities in Hong Kong and Houston.