Sen. Kamala Harris speaks to MSNBC host Chris Matthews in Miami, June 27, 2019.
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Joe Biden has actually revealed the identity of his running mate: Sen. Kamala Devi Harris.
How do you say Kamala? It’s an Indian name, proof that Ms. Harris’s double ethnic culture can’t be written out of the script in the racially absolutist politics of the U.S. Her mom– as many (though not enough) people know– was an Indian immigrant. The senator’s given name, Kamala Devi– Goddess Kamala– is a synonym for Lakshmi, the Hindu divine being of wealth and fortune. The word Kamala actually indicates “she of the lotus,” the flower on which Lakshmi is stated to repose in the Hindu paradises.
As her name floods the news, I wince each time it is said by anchors and politicians who mangle the tension of its vowels. It is noticable “comma-la– like the punctuation mark,” Ms. Harris describes in her memoir, not “Camel-ah,” to rhyme with Pamela, or perhaps “come-AAH-lah,” the commonest mispronunciation.
To make matters made complex: That last sounding of syllables was the method which James Harris, an expert wrestler from Senatobia, Miss., nicknamed “The Ugandan Giant,” pronounced his stage name– which, bafflingly, was “Kamala.” A giant black guy as the Lady of the Lotus? Possibly his handlers puzzled the name with the capital of Uganda. That was certainly the case with the autocorrect function on iPhones, which, for much of Tuesday, was changing Ms. Harris’s given name to “Kampala,” so much so that “Kampala Harris” was trending on.
It can just have been by cosmic alignment that Mr. Harris the wrestler died 2 days prior to Ms. Harris the politician was chosen. He was 70.
There are other paradoxes. Ms. Harris’s progressive economic beliefs sit awkwardly with her being called for a goddess of wealth production. And her mom, Shyamala Gopalan (her first name is noticable “Shyaa-muh-lah”), was an Iyer Brahmin, at the peak of the caste structure of her native Tamil Nadu, a state in south India. The complicated politics of that area have actually caused numerous Tamil Brahmins to seek their fortunes in other places, consisting of Silicon Valley. Gopalan, who passed away in 2009, was a medical scientist at the University of California, Berkeley.
The pronunciation of Ms. Harris’s name is, to be sure, an insignificant element of her political experience. More laden by far is the degree to which she can– and need to– adjust her Indianness on the American political stage. For an ethnic group that is more effective materially in the U.S. than practically any other, Indian-Americans are a noticeably anti-Republican bunch: 84%elected Hillary Clinton in2016 Ms. Harris doesn’t need to play to that ethnic gallery, specifically as it is a small fraction of the electorate.
Rather, she needs to highlight her paternal side– African, through her Jamaican dad. The Democrats are a celebration of ethnic hierarchies, in which smaller sized ethnicities– such as Indians– should efface themselves and wait their turn. It is paradoxical that the party many Indian-Americans contempt is the one to have actually given this country 2 Indian-American governors (Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Nikki Haley of South Carolina).
It’s not impossible that in 2024, America might need to select in between Ms. Harris and Ms. Haley for president. Which will it be, the Tamil Brahmin or the Sikh?
Mr. Varadarajan is executive editor at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
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