From fashion to food, how Indian really are Kamala Harris and Usha Vance?

THE US VICE PRESIDENT and likely presidential candidate Kamala Harris is killing it on the internet! There was a time when the world loved to mock anything Harris-ian―from her unbridled laugh to her dance moves to her love for venn-diagrams to her hair-care routine (apparently, she spends a lot of time on it while on trips) to her “word salads”, when she uses incomprehensible turns of phrase. Today, however, the narrative has turned. What once left people scratching their heads (“What can be, unburdened by what has been”) has now been reclaimed by her supporters. They are mining deep meaning from it, whether she meant it or not. Like her line from a speech last year, when she said, “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?”

Republicans compared it to a daffy talk show while Democrats spliced it into a Taylor Swift track. But Indians immediately knew what she was talking about. It is exactly the kind of thing an Indian mother would tell her children, like Harris’s Tamilian mother Shyamala told her and her younger sister, Maya. In fact, everything Indian about Harris is thanks to her mother. After separating from her Jamaican husband, Shyamala raised Harris and her sister mostly on her own in a Berkeley suburb.

“My mother, grandparents, aunts and uncles instilled us with pride in our South Asian roots,” Harris writes in her autobiography, The Truths We Hold. “All of my mother’s words of affection or frustration came out in her mother tongue―which seems fitting to me, since the purity of those emotions is what I associate with my mother most of all.”

She remembers how her mother loved to cook, and she would sit in the kitchen and watch her. “She had a giant Chinese-style cleaver that she chopped with, and a cupboard full of spices,” writes Harris. “I loved that okra could be soul food or Indian food, depending on what spices you chose; she would add dried shrimp and sausage to make it like gumbo, or fry it up with turmeric and mustard seeds.”

She has also described her love for south Indian food―“rice and yoghurt, potato curry, lots of dal, idli”―while cooking masala dosa with Indian-American actor-producer Mindy Kaling. While chopping onions, she narrated how her mischievous grandfather would make French Toast with eggs when her grandmother, who was strictly vegetarian (“if it had a mother, it was not getting eaten”), went out of the house. Kaling, on her part, could not stop gushing over Harris’s onion-chopping skills. “Senator Harris, with all due respect, you are kind of a show-off,” she said, to which Harris cackled.

When it comes to fashion, she has mostly stuck to pantsuits in sedate colours by designers like Dolce & Gabbana and Akris. She has largely avoided highlighting her mixed-race heritage through her dressing, even side-stepping the question when someone asked her whether she would wear a sari to her inauguration if elected president. “Let’s first win,” she said smilingly. “My mother raised us with a very strong appreciation for our cultural background and pride. Celebrations that we all participate in regardless of how our last name is spelled. It is the beauty of who we are as a nation.”

Guiding light: Kamala Harris with mother Shyamala | X@kamalaharris

Despite these oblique references to her Indianness, Harris has largely avoided the issue, perhaps due to her fear of getting “ghettoised”, or boxed in by her race or gender. Americans, she fears, might not see her as American enough. She has spoken out against racism and anti-Asian hate, but not gone out of her way to reach out to the Indian-American community. Nor has she made any official trips to India since becoming vice president.

For Harris, her Indianness might be a going-back-to-the-roots (“A lotus grows underwater, its flower rising above the surface while its roots are planted firmly in the river bottom,” she wrote in her autobiography, referring to the meaning of her Indian name.) But for Usha Chilukuri Vance, the other Indian-American woman in the news, her Indianness has been more of an attitude, the Indian mentality to excel when out of India. “She has never gotten a B her entire life,” a fellow Yale Law School graduate told The New York Times. Vance, the wife of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, grew up in a middle-class San Diego suburb as the daughter of Indian immigrants from Andhra Pradesh. Her academic background is like a glittering advertisement for an Ivy League education; she studied in Yale College, the University of Cambridge and Yale Law School.

Everything about her spells subdued, subtle and sophisticated, even her appearance at the Republican National Convention, when she made her grand entry into American politics by introducing her husband. She wore a simple sapphire blue dress with one shoulder bare, minimum makeup, her hair let down, with streaks of grey showing. The effect was of a woman who wanted to show who she was, instead of who she wanted to be seen as. Although she is generally reserved, complementing her husband’s flamboyance, she had the right measure of confidence and casualness in her speech.

On the face of it, Vance seems to have the perfect life. She is beautiful (she was featured as one of Yale’s 50 most beautiful women in a campus magazine in 2006) and accomplished. She has a husband who adores her and, in his book Hillbilly Elegy, called her “some sort of genetic anomaly, a combination of every positive quality a human being should have: bright, hardworking, tall and beautiful”. In 2018, the couple, along with their three children and dogs, Pipin and Casper, moved into a 5,000sqft. gothic house in Cincinnati costing $1.4 million, according to The New York Times.

Still, that does not mean she does not have any battles to fight, an important one being her Indian heritage. She has never tried to hide it, speaking about the importance of Hindu spirituality in her life. Even JD, in an interview with Fox News, attributed his spiritual journey to his wife’s Hindu beliefs. The couple married in 2014 in two weddings―a western one followed by a Hindu ceremony officiated by a priest. Vance has also spoken about how she inspired her “meat-and-potatoes” husband to cook vegetarian food for her family. If she decides to fully embrace her Indianness, she might have an uphill task ahead of her, to find acceptance in a party known for its anti-immigrant stance.

For both Harris and Vance, leaning into their Indianness might be risky business, even if they manage to get the Indian-American vote. Still, it would be nice to know how Indian they really are. For example, would they tap their feet to a Diljit Dosanjh number? Would they ‘get’ a Rajinikanth stunt, like him splitting an oncoming bullet into two with his knife? Would they be familiar with draping a sari? Would they be able to appreciate a good sardar joke? All their Ivy League credentials are well and good, but really, this is what the nation wants to know!