Why people in this remote village say Kamala Harris 'makes us proud'

People celebrated in the streets with fireworks and houses were decorated in bright colours in the tiny village of Thulasendrapuram when the results of the 2020 US presidential election were announced.

"This is a very small village. The reason why it is world famous now is because of Kamala Harris. We are praying every day that she should become the President of America," resident Kannan Sundaram said.

Thulasendrapuram in the Tiruvarur district, located 300km south of Chennai (formerly Madras), is where Harris’s maternal grandparents — Painganadu Venkataraman (PV) Gopalan and Rajam Gopalan — were from.

Kamala Harris's ancestral home is Thulasendrapuram village, which is 300km south of Chennai, in India's Tamil Nadu.

The village is home to 350 people and features five temples (Sri Santana Mariamman Kovil, Sri Sevaga Perumal Kovil, Sri Dharma Sastra, Sri Rama Ganapathy, and Sri Vallabha Mahaganapathi) and a lake (Thamarai Kulam).

"Kamala Harris is a progeny of our village. She makes us all proud," Mariyappan said.

A taxi driver reads names of donors in the Sri Dharma Sastra temple in Thulasendrapuram, India. Credit: Abhishek Chinnappa/Getty Images

“About 70 years ago, a gentleman by the name of PV Gopalan lived in the village with his three children — Shyamala, Sarala, and Balachandran. He later moved to the city of Madras (now Chennai). Shyamala is Kamala Harris’s mother,” Mariyappan said.

In an earlier interview with SBS Tamil, Balachandran said his father, PV Gopalan, worked to rehabilitate refugees from East Pakistan in India and later served as an adviser to the Zambian president while living in Lusaka, and his mother was engaged in social work.

At the age of 19, Shyamala was accepted into a master’s program at the University of California, Berkeley. It was there that she met Harris’s father, Donald Harris, an economist from Jamaica.

A poster of US presidential hopeful, Kamala Harris, in her ancestral village Thulasendrapuram in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Source: AFP / IDREES MOHAMMED/AFP via Getty Images

The two foreign graduate students married in 1963 and had two daughters, Kamala and Maya, before divorcing in 1971. Shyamala, a cancer researcher and civil rights activist in California, raised her two daughters as a single mother.

According to Balachandran, and as recounted by the temple priests, Harris remains deeply connected to her Indian roots, both through her upbringing and visits to Chennai.

A woman walks past a poster of US Vice President Kamala Harris in her ancestral village of Thulasendrapuram in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Source: AFP / IDREES MOHAMMED/AFP via Getty Images

In 2020, during a virtual campaign event commemorating India's Independence Day, Harris spoke fondly of her mother's love for good idli (fermented rice and lentil cakes).

However, Narayanaswamy shared a different perspective, telling SBS Tamil that the village has little connection to Harris. He noted that her grandfather left the village over 70 years ago and settled in Chennai.