Her mother's daughter: What Shyamala Gopalan's legacy means to Kamala Harris

CHICAGO - In the story of Kamala Harris’ life, her mother steals the show.

The vice president would have it no other way.

“Mommy, you are the star of this book because you are the reason for everything,” Harris wrote in her 2019 memoir “The Truths We Hold.” “There is no title or honor on earth I’ll treasure more than to say I am Shyamala Gopalan Harris’ daughter.”

Gopalan, a breast cancer researcher who died in 2009 at age 70 of colon cancer, won't see her daughter accept the Democratic Party’s nomination for president on Thursday, but she will be a strong presence.

“I think of her all the time,” Harris wrote. “Sometimes I look up and talk to her.”

By all accounts, Harris' mother, though tiny in stature, barely topping 5 feet, was a giant intellectually and through sheer force of will.

Gopalan set out on her own across the world at the age of 19, defying her native culture. She raised two girls to identify both with her own background and one that was totally alien to her. She encouraged them to excel and exceed expectations but not leave others behind. And she did it all while performing important scientific work of her own.

In interviews with friends, colleagues and close family, along with Harris' own memoir, it becomes clear that the vice president's relationship with her mother helped shape her as a person and a politician. Her mother, whom she always called "mommy," provided her with a vision for social justice, a sense of her place in the world and her spirit.

In the book, Harris recalled a time when she had just entered the California attorney general race. Gopalan, who was seriously ill with cancer, wanted to know how it was going.

“Mommy, these guys are saying they’re gonna kick my ass,” Harris told her.

Gopalan had been lying on her side.

“She rolled over, looked at me, and just unveiled the biggest smile,” Harris wrote. “She knew who she had raised. She knew her fighting spirit was alive and well inside me.”

Ahead of her time

Born in 1938, almost a decade before India’s independence from the British empire, to a civil servant father and homemaker mother, Gopalan was the eldest of four.

Her father, P.V. Gopalan was the first in his family to leave southern India for postings in Bombay, Calcutta and Delhi, (three of the country’s four major cities), Gopalan Balachandran, Shyamala Gopalan’s brother and the sibling closest in age to her, said in an interview with USA TODAY.

Their parents were “relatively lax” as long as they weren’t doing “anything outwardly bad,” the 83-year-old recalled.

“She was feisty, and mischievous,” he said, adding the two of them would skip classes in school and try other stunts. "We got into trouble."

One bold move by Gopalan, though, would change the trajectory of her life and the course of U.S. history.

At age 19, soon after she had graduated from the University of Delhi, Gopalan revealed to her family that she had applied and secured admittance to a Ph.D. program in nutrition and endocrinology at the University of California, Berkeley. At that time in India, particularly in her conservative Tamil Brahmin community, she would have been considered as being of “marriageable age,” especially since she had already graduated college.

“Because they wouldn't want a girl to be more educated than their husband,” said Balachandran.

But their progressive father took a different approach, he said.

“My father said, ‘For one year, I’ll fully support you, but after that I won’t have money,’” recalled Balachandran. “He had limited means.”

Shyamala and the girls

In 1958, the diminutive Gopalan landed in the U.S. without knowing anyone.

She arrived eight years before the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 eliminated the quota system that had given preference to people of European descent, limiting the number of Indians in America. Just 12,000 Indian immigrants were living in the entire United States by 1960, according to the Migration Policy Institute.

Almost immediately, Gopalan gravitated to the Black community and found common cause in the Civil Rights Movement. At one such meeting in 1962 she met Donald Harris, a student from Jamaica who was pursuing a doctorate in economics.

One year later, the two were married. Gopalan's parents had expected her to return to India for an arranged marriage within her community. She defied tradition by marrying someone not only of her choosing but outside her race and nationality.

Kamala Harris has called her mother’s decision an act of “self-determination and love.”

In 1964, at age 25, Gopalan received her doctorate and gave birth to Kamala. Two years later, she gave birth to Maya, now a civil rights champion.

The marriage didn’t last. The couple divorced in 1971.

Gopalan raised her children ? “Shyamala and the girls” as the trio was known ? in the highly diverse working-class community in the Berkeley Flats neighborhood. Although Harris and her sister were raised with a strong connection to their Indian roots (starting with their names), Harris wrote that her mother "understood very well that she was raising two Black daughters" in America.

"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," she wrote.

She sent her children to sing in the choir of a local Black church and lived above a nursery school run by a Black woman.

Regina Shelton and Gopalan formed a strong bond, and Harris has referred to her as a “second mother” with whom she spent time while her mother worked in the lab.

Carole Porter, a childhood friend of Harris' who lived in the neighborhood and attended the same elementary school and daycare said she’d often see Gopalan dropping off Harris around the duplex.

Sometimes, she’d also see Harris’ Indian grandparents – her grandmother in a saree is a distinct memory – visiting.

"She would ask me to come and say hello to them," Porter told USA TODAY, talking about how firmly rooted Harris was in her mother’s culture.

Gopalan was a “strong mother” presence throughout her daughters’ lives, Porter said.

When Harris was running for San Francisco DA’s office, her mother would be the one charging around with an ironing board (to use a standup desk) and doing Kinko's runs to copy her flyers, she said.

An intellectual powerhouse

The first time Dr. Robert Cardiff, a professor emeritus of Medicine at the University of California, Davis, saw Gopalan in the 1960s, she cut a striking figure.

Dressed in a saree, the petite woman was holding court at a conference with “famous people in mouse mammary biology,” he said.

“She was leading the band. She was talking and engaging with everybody,” he told USA TODAY. “She stood out.”

Decades later, Gopalan ? whose work in the isolation and characterization of the progesterone receptor gene in mice changed research on the hormone-responsiveness of breast tissue ? would go on to co-author scientific research papers with Cardiff.

“She was a brilliant woman, and she would overcome me in any scientific discussions we’d have because she knew the literature more extensively than I did,” the 88-year-old retired professor with an M.D. and Ph.D. said.

She also had a “wonderful sense of humor.”

“She was very verbose,” he said. “We used to joke that I thought that a single picture was worth a thousand words, and she was convinced that a thousand words is much better than a picture.”

Lessons from 'mommy'

In ways big and small, Gopalan was omnipresent in Harris’ life.

If the sisters were having a bad day or the weather was gloomy, there was the “unbirthday” gift and “unbirthday” cake –  inspiration apparently drawn from Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass.”

Harris wrote about many lessons she learned from her mother.

Don’t do anything halfway.

You may be the first to do many things, but make sure you’re not the last ? in other words, be a mentor.

Don’t let any situation get the better of you

If "Shyamala's girls" whined about some injustice, the retort was always a quick: what are you going to do about it? or "Do something!" That catch phrase, often repeated by Harris during her speeches, seems to have resonated with former first lady Michelle Obama who used it as a rallying cry when she spoke at the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday.

Harris wrote and has talked about people making assumptions about Gopalan's intellect based on her “heavy accent.”

Her lesson? Don't you let anyone tell you who you are. You tell them who you are.

Leaving a legacy

Earlier this year, Mini Timmaraju, a reproductive rights advocate received the Dr. Shyamala Gopalan Harris Award for Allyship and Civil Rights from Indian American Impact, a voting rights and advocacy group.

“My mother would love you and your work,” Harris wrote in a letter to Timmaraju accompanying the award.

Timmaraju, who worked closely with Maya Harris on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, said it was clear that their mother had been a big influence on them both.

“In terms of the way that they think about social good and social welfare. It was very obvious to me right off the bat that this was an unusual story because she had to have been a pioneer to not only come here before the 1965 immigration law but also as a teenager,” she said.

The mother of two adopted Black sons, Timmaraju, an Indian American whose husband is white, says she’s in awe of the way Gopalan raised her children.“I think about 'how did she raise these women to be so unabashedly Black and yet have pride in their ethnic origin and yet not be Black herself,'” she said.

Deepak Raj, co-founder of Impact, said the organization was moved to create the award in Gopalan’s name because of her trailblazing leadership in the civil rights movement and mentoring students of color.

“Her legacy is a reminder that the immigrant experience is not just about personal achievement," Raj said. "But it's also about public service. It's about giving back to the community, and building a path for the future generations.”

Going home

As she neared her death, Gopalan’s biggest wish was to go back to India for one last visit.

That remained unfulfilled.

Realizing she wouldn’t be able to make the trip,  Balachandran, whom Harris lovingly calls “Uncle Balu” got on a plane from Delhi to see her one last time.

“I now realize that she waited for his arrival, waited to say goodbye,” Harris wrote. “She passed away the very next morning.”

After her death, Harris traveled to Chennai, India, where she had gone every other year with her mother to see her grandparents. During her visits growing up, she’d go on long walks on Elliot's Beach with her grandfather and his friends who lived in Beasant Nagar. She'd return there after her mother's death.

“Kamala brought Shyamala’s ashes with her,” Balachandran told USA TODAY. “We went to Elliot’s Beach in the Bay of Bengal to immerse her ashes.”

In her memoir, Harris described a moment after her mother's death when she was frantically searching for Gopalan's recipe for chiles rellenos, which she traditionally made around Christmas.

“I found a notebook, and as soon as I opened it, the recipe fell right out of the pages and onto the floor,” Harris wrote. “It was like she was there with me, still responding to my needs."

Taking over

Harris fondly remembers the times she’d sit with her mom in the kitchen and watch and smell and eat. She had giant Chinese style cleaver that she chopped and a cupboard full of spices.

Balachandran said his niece has now taken over her mother's role of cooking vegetarian south Indian dishes for him whenever he visits.

He happened to be visiting Harris the night before President Joe Biden dropped his bid for reelection and decided to endorse Harris instead.

“She had absolutely no idea. She wouldn’t have been sitting and having a long dinner with us, otherwise,” he said.

On Thursday, Balachandran and his two younger sisters will have prime seats at the convention as they watch their niece accept her party's nomination for U.S. President.

Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy is a White House correspondent for USA TODAY. You can follow her on X, formerly Twitter, @SwapnaVenugopal

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: How one decision by Shyamala Harris could create American history