US vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris, who is the first Asian-American and African-American to be chosen as a running mate by a major party’s presidential candidate, always talks about her “Indianness” to woo Asian voters. However, many people still don’t know how Indian Harris actually is and where she comes from.

The 56-year-old Senator from California is the daughter of an Indian immigrant, her mother was from India and father from Jamaica. That is why she has missed no opportunity to remember and credit her mother.

She is the daughter of Shyamala Gopalan Harris from Chennai, a breast cancer researcher and a single mother, who gave birth to Harris and her sister Maya. She passed away in 2009.  Her father Donald Harris teaches at Stanford University.

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Harris often visited her grandparents and relatives in Tamil Nadu. “My mother, grandparents, aunts and uncle instilled us with pride in our South Asian roots … we were raised with a strong awareness of and appreciation for Indian culture. All of my mother’s words of affection or frustration came out in her mother tongue (Tamil) – which seems fitting to me since the purity of those emotions is what I associate with my mother most of all,” she wrote in her memoir.

She has mentioned that her grandfather PV Gopalan was a civil servant and was once the original freedom fighter of India. “Some of my fondest memories from childhood were walking along the beach with him after he retired and lived in Madras,” she said in an interview with India Abroad, which was republished by CNN.

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Interestingly, she very well knows her the south-Indian food, including idli, dosa and curd-rice. In a cooking show with actor Mindy Kailing, she talked about how her mother ensured she always had home-cooked meals before leaving for work.

Harris’ maternal uncle Gopalan Balachandran once told Reuters that she used to go to temples with Shyamala and after the death of her mother Harris brought her (mother’s) ashes and immersed it in the Bay of Bengal.

The attorney general, who

became the first Indian-origin and second African-American woman to join the Senate, launched her presidential campaign in January 2019 but could not take off and by the end of the year withdrew from the race.