08 February 2025

The Tamil Brahminical imprints of Kamala Harris

Kamala Harris could be the ideal multi-ethnic, multi-cultural resident of the White House, if elected. However, the more beholden she is to her 'Black' identity, the more manifest will be her Tamil Brahmin roots.

Polity_details_page_thumb.png

US presidential elections 2024

How ‘Black’ or ‘Brahmanical’ is Kamala Harris? This question may only be posed by some sections of the US electorate which is now being increasingly fractured by the rise of alt-right and white supremacists. While the ‘Black’ identity is deeply entrenched in Kamala Harris’s popular imagery, the incumbent vice president and presumptive Democrat nominee has far deeper roots in her Tamil Brahmanical lineage. In this analysis, Stig Toft Madsen undertakes a detailed profiling of the Tamil Brahmin’s global imprint and its influence on Harris’s persona. 

On 20 January 2021, Kamala Harris was sworn in as the Vice-President of the United States of America. Three and a half years later, Kamala Harris is now running for the American Presidency. In this essay, first written in 2021 and now updated, I try to bring out the Indian roots of Kamala Harris as a “Tamil Brahmin.” 

Ignoring the ancient taboo which forbid traveling over the Black Seas, Indians have gone abroad for higher studies for a century and a half. Initially, the UK was the destination; but after the Second World War, the US grew in importance.

The mother of Kamala Harris, Shyamala Gopalan, a Tamil Brahmin, reached the USA from Madras at the age of nineteen to study medicine. At that time, it was unusual for a single Indian woman to make this journey. She was a trailblazer, but she was also encouraged by her parents to make the move.

At Berkeley, she met her future husband, Donald D Harris, and they both got involved in civil rights campaigns and Black study groups. Harris is a Jamaican from the same part of the island as Bob Marley. He became a prominent neo-Keynesian economist at Stanford University studying social development and inequality.

The marriage did not last long. Kamala Harris and her sister, Maya, were brought up by their mother, who acquired custody of the children after a  “tough custody battle.” Caribbean immigrants to the US may see Kamala Harris as a spokesperson for their interests. She also acknowledges these roots. However, I will concentrate on her Indian roots.

The global profile of Tamil Brahmins

I will use publicly accessible material supplemented by a 2008 article by Chris Fuller and Haripriya Narasimhan called “From Landlords to Software Engineers: Migration and Urbanization among Tamil Brahmans”, which deals explicitly with Tamil Brahmins. Fuller and Narasimhan also wrote a book entitled Tamil Brahmans: The Making of a Middle-Class Caste on the subject. According to a review by Kathinka Frøystad, it “will be a standard reference in the scholarship  of Tamil Nadu and the conundrum of caste and class in general for many years to come.”

Tamil Brahmins are, and have always been, an elite group or caste cluster. Because the Indian census operations do not enumerate “forward castes,” the exact numbers of Tamil Brahmins presently in Tamil Nadu is unknown, but may number around 1.5 million. This part of India largely lacks the specialized warrior castes, the Rajputs, who have been prominent in the history of North India.

In pre-British Tamil Nadu, the priestly caste of Brahmins controlled many of the large temples and much of the agricultural land in the hydraulic civilization based in the river basins. This made Tamil Nadu a bit different from other areas where Brahmins exerted their influence such as Kerala, Maharashtra, Bengal, UP or Kashmir. 

The Brahmins may not have been kings, but they were close to the kings. The kingly order was “encompassed” by the Brahmanic order, as Louis Dumont had it. Dumont did his fieldwork in South India. He reckoned the South Indians as gifted sociologists with a good understanding of their own society and culture. He did not bestow similar praise on the north Indians.

While much of South Asia came under the sway of Islam, Tamil Nadu remained less affected by Islam. Relations between Hindus and Muslims were not as bad as elsewhere. Abdul Kalam, who was a key figure in India’s missile and nuclear programmes, and who rose to become the President of India, hailed from a fish merchant family in the extreme corner of Tamil Nadu. In school, he sat next to the Brahmin boys from the families, who managed the huge Rameshwaram temple. 

The caste occupation – or sacerdotal duties - of the Tamil Brahmins were priestly services and religious study. However, the Tamil Brahmins were quick to enter modern education. There are various opinions as to how these Brahmins could make the transition from one form of learning to another, but no disagreement that many did so to an extent that would have made TB Macaulay, who pioneered Western education in India in the 1830s, happy.

The Brahmins came to dominate the government machinery in the Madras Presidency. As the British contingent in officialdom thinned out, the Brahmin dominance became even clearer, which was one reason for the British to establish quotas for other castes allowing them a share of the spoils of the Raj.

Apart from being safely ensconced as civil servants, or “Revenue Brahmins,” in government service, Tamil Brahmins also took to engineering, medicine, law and business. Initially, the Brahmins were hesitant to study medicine due to the close contact with bodily substances and disease so anathema to them. However, the aversion eased and, thus, Shyamala Gopalan could choose medicine.

Though landowners, the Brahmins had never “touched the plough,” implying, they did not work in the fields. However, they did take to engineering. It was via engineering that they made the step into Information Technology, where they are now safely ensconced in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. 

Apart from administration, management, medicine, engineering and law, the Tamil Brahmins also saw to it that their daughters received training in classical dance, while both men and women became singers and instrumentalists. Among sports, chess has been popular. Vishwanathan Anand, world champion until defeated by the Norwegian Magnus Carlsen, is a Tamil Brahmin. The new chess genius, Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa, and his sister Rameshbabu Vaishali, are also Tamil Brahmins.

However, the pinnacle of intellectual activity in the eyes of Tamil Brahmins, is mathematics. Everything else ranks below, Fuller and Narasimhan opine.

The near-monopoly on government jobs lasted for decades, but slowly the lower castes started pushing the Brahmins off the land and out of the villages towards the cities. Nowadays there are several areas of Madras (or Chennai), where Brahmins are numerous. One of these areas is called Besant Nagar, named after the British theosophist and reformer Annie Besant.

In an article titled “How Kamala Harris’s Family in India Helped Shape Her Values,” Jeffrey Gentleman and Suhasini Raj pinpoint the importance of this place in the life of Kamala Harris:

Her grandfather, P.V. Gopalan, had served for decades in the Indian government, and his ritual, nearly every morning, was to meet up with his retired buddies and talk politics as they strolled along the beach in Besant Nagar, a seaside neighborhood in Chennai where brightly painted fishing boats line the sand and Hindu temples stare out at the sea. During her visits from the United States, Ms. Harris tagged along while the men discussed equal rights, corruption and the direction India was headed.

“I remember the stories that they would tell and the passion with which they spoke about the importance of democracy,” Ms.  Harris said in a 2018 speech to an Indian American group. “As I reflect on those moments in my life that have had the most impact on who I am today — I wasn’t conscious of it at the time — but it was those walks on the beach with my grandfather in Besant Nagar that had a profound impact on who I am today.”  

I cannot vouch for how much wisdom and statecraft was imparted to her under the watchful eye of these latter-day Revenue Brahmins, but I take it to be quite a lot.

Other Brahmins went to other big cities in India, including Delhi. In Bombay, they were not always welcome: Around fifty years back, there was a movement against South Indian immigrants to that city. Still others migrated to the USA, where this ethnic group could leverage its intellectual capital with the highest possible economic returns.

According to Fuller and Narasimhan, there are no figures to show how many Tamil Brahmins are in the US tech industry, but there are many. Some of them have made it good enough to call it a day, and have returned to India.

Thus, there was no class war: The Brahmins left the villages without a violent revolution. Unlike the Hindus in Sri Lanka, who rose in a secessionist revolt when the Sinhalese masses started pushing the Jaffna Tamils out of their elite positions, the Brahmins in Tamil Nadu moved to new pastures. Those who remained in Tamil Nadu have often taken progressive positions. There are a good number of Marxist Brahmins in Tamil Nadu, but they did not start a class war like some Brahmin Marxists did elsewhere.

Marxism apart, Tamil politics as a whole became flagrantly populist under the banner of regional parties. The so-called Dravidian movement is anti-Aryan, anti-Brahmin, anti-North Indian, anti-Hindi, and anti-priestly in various proportions. The leaders of the movement included Karunanidhi from the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) party, and his opponent, the film star MG Ramachandran, or MGR, from the Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (ADMK) party.

The strange aspect, however, is that the actress Jayalalitha, who had acted in films with MGR, managed to unceremoniously push aside his widow, Janaki, to take the first place in the party upon MGR’s death despite the fact that she was a Brahmin. Thus, a Brahmin woman became the leader of a populist Dravidian party with an anti-Brahmin agenda.

Both DMK and ADMK were corrupt, and for decades politics moved around corruption cases.  Jayalalitha took it to extremes, when she promoted her foster son, Sudhakaran, all the while playing the savior of the poor and needy in a soup opera that turned politics into a mixture of entertainment and hero-worship and made outsiders shake their head in disbelief.

However, even under such circumstances – or when rulers got too old to rule – the bureaucracy in Tamil Nadu saw to it that the state did not descend into chaos. Thus, Tamil Nadu has remained for decades a nice South Indian state infused with the tenor of decency, middle class values such a studiousness, and rationality, thanks, not the least, to its enlightened Brahmin elite.

What Harris inherits from Tamil Brahminical roots?

What does this all say about Kamala Harris, if anything?

I think one may recognize Kamala Harris as a Tamil Brahmin. She may not be from a very influential family, but from a family that early on took advantage of opportunities in the US by mobilizing the intellectual capital of a female member of the group.

Otherwise, “the great majority of Tamil Brahman women moved only at the behest of husbands or other male kin,” as Fuller and Narasimhan put it. More recently, families counting on careers in IT have increasingly allowed women to move on their own. In a sense, Shyamala Gopalan was an early bird in this bid to augment the resources of the ethnic group, but she did so in the medical profession.

Kamala Harris went neither for medicine, nor for engineering. Instead, she took to law, which is a standard choice of the Indian middle classes, especially for those politically inclined. Until the 1960s or so, lawyers dominated the Indian parliament.

In the US, lawyers have similarly taken to politics. Kamala Harris’s choice of the legal profession, therefore, is fully in line with her Tamil past as well as her American present. As a district attorney, as the attorney general of California, and as a senator, Harris initiated a series of reforms. The demand in the US to radically “defund the police,” which rose after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, however, would neither be in line with her Tamil Brahmin background, nor with her schooling as a lawyer, as far as I can see.

Kamala Harris can be associated with at least three things that cannot be derived in a straightforward manner from her Tamil Brahmin roots.

First, Tamil Brahmins, unlike Kashmiri Brahmins or even Bengali Brahmins, are strict vegetarians. It is clear from this YouTube-clip that Kamala Harris is fully acquainted with the standard South India vegetarian fare of idli and dosa, etc. However, she also has spoken favorably about dishes prepared with such ingredients as pork. This has earned her no brownies among Vegans, who have accused her of racism, because hog rearing in some parts of the USA is bad not only for the pigs and for nature, but also for the Black communities.

I do not think Kamala Harris has responded directly to this, but she has indicated that she favors a diet with less meat. In any case, partaking of a non-vegetarian diet is a major gastro-political step away from Brahmanic traditions. As Fuller and Narasimhan note, “… hardly any Tamil Brahmans eat snails to demonstrate cosmopolitanism ….; more often, they worry about how to find pure vegetarian food, so that stories of software engineers in carnivorous countries who survived on nuts or vegetarian stock cubes are common currency among them.”

Second, Kamala Harris seems to be only partly a practicing Hindu. Shyamala Gopalan brought Kamala up in a part-Hindu, part-Christian ethos. More recently, she has attended the services of a Baptist priest, who used to be a student of Martin Luther King. The Dravidian movement in Tamil Nadu has a strong atheist bend. Kamala Harris could have taken a leaf from this, but, apparently, she has not done so.

Third, after remaining unmarried for a long time, she married Doug Emhoff after a blind date arranged by a person in their professional network. Emhoff is also a lawyer and thus, the alliance conforms to a typical Indian pattern of allowing greater connubial leeway among professional peers. Emhoff is Jewish. Marrying a Jew is highly unusual for a Tamil Brahmin.

Very few Jews still live in India. However, as Fuller and Narasimhan point out, there are similarities between the Jews and Tamil Brahmins. The latter have not been persecuted as the Jews have, but both groups are “service nomads … disproportionately well-represented in education and the professions.”

Kamala Harris: A multi-ethnic Brahmin?

In conclusion, I posit that it makes sense to view Kamala Harris as a politically and socially progressive Tamil Brahmin, who followed a beaten path from law to politics not in India itself, but in the USA. At the same time, she has diverged from the beaten path thanks to her mixed Indian Jamaican/Black parentage, and her assault on the culinary, confessional and connubial signposts that define Brahmin-hood.

A Black, Baptist, non-vegetarian, fair-skinned Brahmin married to a Jew, who already had two children, earns the family the epithet “blended” in the New York Times. Her life situation, the article points out, is not uncommon nowadays in the US.

Time will show whether mirroring the demographics of the day and embodying diversity will help solving some of the problems that the US faces. In 2021, the inauguration of Kamala Harris was celebrated with “sweets, prayers and souvenirs” in her ancestral village, Thulasendrapuram, situated in the delta region of the Cauvery River.

In one click, one may move from this article about  Thulasendrapuram to another article in The Hindu presenting the 17 Indo-Americans so far “roped in” as White House staff. Some of these new entrants will deal with matters of health, the economy and security, but many of them will work on issues relating to human rights and democracy. Several of them seem to have earned their place in the White House by serving in the Biden-Harris campaign.

Cut to 2024, the number of Indians in powerful positions in the US has increased further to the extent the Indians have become the most politically active Asians in the US, as pointed out in a latest New York Times report.

Some 4.4 million people in the US have identified as Indians.

When Shyama Gopalan arrived in 1958, she was one of only 12,000 Indian immigrants in the country. A few years back, the number of illegal Indian immigrants in the US was estimated to be 725,000, contributing to the pressure on the border. When asked whether she had gone to the southern border, Kamala Harris, keeping a Brahmanical distance, indicated that she saw no good reason to go there.

In the United Kingdom, some Indian immigrants like Rishi Sunak, Priti Patel and Suella Braverman have taken tough stands on immigration, and it is possible that Kamala Haris will do the same in the event that she is elected as President. She is not, however, likely to adopt the foul-mouthed style as now increasingly seen in American politics.

Rather, she may become the missing middle: A suitable President for the Kali Yuga in a country of old and new minorities.  

(Views expressed in this article are the author's own.)

Subscribe

Write to us

We welcome comments, suggestions and also articles/op-eds/analyses. Do write to us.