AT AN HOUR’S drive from the city of Thanjavur is a small village in Mannargudi in south Tamil Nadu. At first glance, there is nothing special about Thulasendrapuram―an agrarian village in the Cauvery delta in Thiruvarur district. The surrounding villages, however, cannot match its fame. In 2020, a woman with roots in the village rose to the second highest office in the world’s most powerful country. Four years later, she is all set to run for president.
The heart of Thulasendrapuram is a Dharma Sastha temple. Posters and banners of Vice President Kamala Harris have sprung up around the temple. A kilometre from the temple is a long, narrow, muddy path that leads to the agraharam―the Brahmin settlement. There are a few houses, painted white and saffron, here but there are many vacant plots, too. Most of the families have moved out.
“Gopalan Iyer’s house was on the opposite lane,” says N. Lalitha, wife of a priest in the village. “It is a vacant plot now. They must have moved out of the village many decades ago.” Nonetheless, Lalitha takes pride in calling Thulasendrapuram “Kamala Harris’s village”.
Many of the villagers seem to share similar sentiments. For them, it does not matter whether Harris is Indian or not. Or that she has never visited the village. They are proud of her and see in her a potential US president.
Malarkodi Pugazhenthiran, a 56-year-old who lives in a one-room, thatched house near the temple, was among the women in the village who drew kolams to celebrate Harris becoming vice president in 2020. Pugazhenthiran, who makes vadagam (sun-dried rice cakes) for a living, says she also drew a map of the US in front of her house. What if Harris wins this time? “I will draw the world map, because she will be the topmost person in the world,” she says. She adds that there were several prayer sessions for Harris in 2020 and that they have started again now.
The entire village seems well informed about US politics. They know what Donald Trump stands for. They know why Joe Biden withdrew. R. Vijayakumar, former ward councillor of Thulasendrapuram, watches only the world news on TV these days. Reading up on US election news in the papers, he goes around educating villagers on the latest developments. “It is just general knowledge and political awareness,” he says. “We prayed for her victory [in 2020]. She won last time as VP. Now, again she will win.”
Harris’s maternal grandfather Painganadu Venkatraman Gopalan Iyer moved out of Thulasendrapuram in the early decades of the 20th century to work in Delhi. A civil servant, he was sent to Zambia as director of relief measures and refugees. He went on to become adviser to the first president of Zambia, Kenneth Kaunda. Harris’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan, earned a PhD in endocrinology from the University of California, Berkeley. She met and married Jamaican economist Donald J. Harris and settled in the US. Her sister, Sarala, an obstetrician who practised in Chennai, and her brother, Balachandran, an academician who holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, are said to have visited Thulasendrapuram on multiple occasions.
Shyamala and her daughters used to visit Gopalan in Chennai. In her memoir, The Truths We Hold, Harris recalls how she was strongly influenced by Gopalan’s progressive views on democracy and women’s rights. She also mentions her conversations with her grandfather, right from her childhood, through letters and over the telephone.
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Villagers say Gopalan used to visit occasionally and had “an excellent quality in himself and always wanted his daughters to be ahead of the times”. He is remembered as a “well-read, progressive man with deep knowledge in world affairs”. Villagers say his family donated money for the Sastha temple in 2014. “Gopalan’s second daughter visited the village temple and donated Rs5,000 in Kamala’s name,” says R. Krishnamurthy, a retired SBI general manager who shuttles between Thulasendrapuram and Chennai. “But, none of us saw her then. We did not know that one day Kamala will be prominent.”
The villagers say Gopalan was known for his ability to be calm under pressure. This quality must have helped him work in Zambia at a challenging time. They say Harris has inherited his qualities, which would help her win the presidency.
“Our Dharma Sastha will ensure her victory,” claims Lalitha.