‘I Grew Up In A Black And Indian Household, Just Like Kamala Harris’
I felt a distinct lump in my throat when I heard that Senator Kamala Harris was going to be the Democratic nominee for vice president. It wasn’t that she was the first Black nominee. Or that she was the first Indian-American nominee.
It was that she was the first Black and Indian-American nominee.
Frankly, there weren’t too many of us when I was growing up. By “us,” I mean children raised in households that were both Black and Indian. My Indian mother, Madhur Jaffrey, married my Black stepfather, Sanford Allen, in 1965, just a couple years after Harris’s Indian mother married her Jamaican father.
For Indian women, this kind of inter-racial “love” marriage wasn’t merely unconventional, it was an assault on their acutely color-conscious home country, where the caste system imposed its rigid order on social life.
For both Harris’s mother and mine, history weighed heavily. They had absorbed the trauma of India’s partition into two nations. They had witnessed the upheaval of India’s fight for independence and had felt the collective shudder upon the death of Mahatma Gandhi. In her 2019 autobiography, The Truths We Hold, Harris wrote that her mother was “conscious of history, conscious of struggle, conscious of inequities. She was born with a sense of justice imprinted on her soul." That sounds like my mother.
A Hindu, my mother has painful memories of India’s partition, when her Muslim schoolmates were ripped from their homes and lives and packed onto trains heading to Pakistan. Vivid spectacles of injustice—millions died during Partition—forged her passion for equity and shaped her personal quest for a life of freedom and independence.
These tiny, kurta-clad pioneers—Harris’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan, and my mother—abandoned sheltered lives and embraced the adventure of America, believing its promise of endless possibilities outweighed the risk of social isolation and personal failure.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the women landed in the coastal capitals of counterculture—Shyamamla in Berkeley and my mother in Greenwich Village. Harris’s mother met Donald Harris when they were graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley. They bonded over a shared zest for civil rights activism.
My parents didn’t march in the streets. Instead, they broke barriers on New York stages. A graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, my mother came to New York in 1957 oozing talent and charm and ready for her close-up. But six decades ago roles for Asians of any sort were all but nonexistent. The only Indian imports visible in America were yoga and the occasional Hare Krishna. In the unlikely event that someone wrote a part for an Indian, Peter Sellars was there to play it.
Meanwhile, my step-father, Sanford Allen, was climbing his own hill. A violinist, he was the first Black member of the New York Philharmonic, forging a lonely path to the peak of classical music. Just as Donald Harris’s extended Black community provided shelter for the newcomer from India, my step-father’s family enfolded my mother and her three little girls.
My mother filled in the long stretches between acting jobs by writing cookbooks. Her family’s recipes for sag paneer and dal were lovingly served at our apartment on 12th Street. But every Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter, my family gathered around a table in Bedford-Stuyvesant laden with my Kentucky grandpa’s collard greens, black-eyed peas, biscuits, and ham.
In the course of one inter-borough subway-ride the stories changed from tales of monsoons and mangoes to memories of tobacco fields and the great migration north to Harlem. When I listened to Harris discuss her extended family in South India and Jamaica, I readily imagined the nourishment provided by both cultures, both histories. It all seemed so familiar.
Like me, Kamala Harris grew up in an Indian-Black household fueled by curries and collards, and governed by parents determined to prove themselves, to surmount steep odds and claim a hard-won piece of America. Our Indian mothers and our Black fathers became American pioneers. Like me, Harris inherited the bounty. It’s apt that her chosen Secret Service code name will be “Pioneer."
Sakina Jaffrey is a TV and film actress born and raised in New York City. She is best known to audiences for her role as Linda Vasquez on the Netflix hit House of Cards. Sakina is currently developing a TV pilot called Om Pioneers about growing up in Greenwich Village in the 1970s in her family of trailblazers. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter.
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