Kamala Harris remembers her mother Shyamala Gopalan: Came from India alone at 19

US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris said that her mother’s “courage and determination” was the inspiration behind her achievements.

Sharing a childhood picture with her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, she said in a post on X, “My mother, Dr. Shyamala Gopalan Harris, came to the United States from India alone at the age of 19. Her courage and determination made me who I am today.”

Harris has talked about her mother, who was a scientist, in several of her speeches. The anecdotes about her mother have helped Harris to talk about feminism and racism.

Notably, during her rally in Washington this week, the person she mentioned the most, after Republican presidential candidate and former US president Donald Trump, was her mother, according to a report by news agency AFP.

She also talks about her mother’s American experience as a woman of colour, a concept she hardly ever discusses as it pertains to her own life. Harris refrains from mentioning that she would become the first female US president if elected, as well as the first Black woman and person of South Asian descent to be the president.

In her first speech as the party’s official presidential nominee, Harris talked about the journey of her mother, who left India at 19 years to do a master’s degree in California.

Kamala’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan, went on to become a breast cancer researcher, who contributed to the development of treatments for the disease.

Gopalan met Jamaican immigrant Donald Harris in the 1960s at the University of California in Berkeley, where he had come to study economics. Kamala Harris was born to them in 1964.

After her parents divorced when she was five, Kamala and her sister Maya were mainly raised by Shyamala.

“She taught us to never complain about injustice, but do something about it,” Harris has said.

Harris uses stories from her childhood to make a more personal connection with voters, and emphasise how she intends to work for middle-class families that reflect her own upbringing.

The US Vice President often talks about how her mother “worked long hours,” and then sat late at night drinking tea with “a pile of bills in front of her.” Harris also says that her mother kept a strict budget.

She also talked about caring for her sick mother, preparing meals and choosing clothes that would not irritate her skin. Shyamala died in 2009 after a battle with colon cancer.