Among the important family documents and certificates in her almirah, US Vice-President Kamala Harris must also be having the sepia-coloured Lady Irwin College degree of her late mother, Shyamala Gopalan.
Kamala is set to become the first Indian-American woman to be a presidential candidate of a major party in the US after American President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race, and endorsed her as the Democratic nominee. She now just needs to be nominated in the party convention next month.
In 1956, Kamala’s mother Shyamala came all the way from the then Madras (now Chennai) to study home science at the prestigious Lady Irwin College of Delhi University. It may be recalled that from a modest beginning with 11 students in 1932, the Lady Irwin College has provided higher education to generations of women.
It has an illustrious history. The college in red-brick building was established under the patronage of Lady Dorothy Irwin, the visionary wife of Lord Irwin.
Bhaskar Rammurthy, a retired Central government official and somebody who knows the Tamil community of Delhi well, says that Kamala’s mother belonged to very progressive Tamil Brahmin family.
“The community used to invest a lot in the education of even their daughters. That is very much evident as they allowed young Shyamala to go to New Delhi to pursue her dreams,” he says.
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It, however, remains a mystery why Kamala’s mother chose to go to Lady Irwin College since in those days it was known “as a place that specialised in preparing girls for marriage, to be good wives”.
But Shyamala had other plans and ambitions. She was born to PV Gopalan, a civil servant, and Rajam, her mother. Kamala’s uncle, Balachandran, had once said that their parents were broad minded in raising children, all of who led somewhat unconventional lives.
Her father began his professional life as a stenographer, rising through the ranks in civil service, moving the family every few years between Madras, New Delhi, Bombay, and Kolkata. From 1930s to 1950s, a very large number of young Tamils were flocking to Delhi to seek government or private sector jobs.
“Even if Kamala Harris’s grandparents were not based in Delhi when their daughter was studying here, there is every chance that some of her relatives would be here. Those were the days when Delhi was not that big and everyone in my community knew each other,” says Venkat Sundaram, a former Delhi cricketer, whose father was one of the founders of Delhi Tamil Education Association (DTEA) schools in the Capital.
According to Professor R Rajaraman, emeritus professor of theoretical physics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and a classmate of Shyamala when they were teenagers in Tamil Nadu, “In our class of around four dozen students, girls and boys sat on separate sides of the classroom and there was little interaction between genders. But Shyamala wasn’t shy about speaking to boys. She was confident.”
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After getting her degree from DU at the age of 19, Shyamala left India for a country she’d never visited before and where she didn’t know anyone to eventually pursue a PhD in nutrition and endocrinology.
When G-20 summit took place in Delhi last year, there were some speculations that President Biden may not attend it due to health concerns. In his place, Vice President Kamala Harris was expected to visit Delhi. That possibility of her visit to the national capital was dashed as Biden finally came here.
Now, one only hopes that Kamala Harris visits India as President of US in the near future and visits Lady Irwin College.
If Kamala becomes President and visits Delhi, she would join the likes of Dwight D Eisenhower (1959), Richard Nixon (1969), Jimmy Carter (1978), Bill Clinton (2000), George W Bush (2006), Barack Obama (2010 and 2015), Donald Trump (2020) and Joe Biden (2023) to visit India.
Alas, the charismatic John F. Kennedy was assassinated just a couple of months before he was to embark on a visit to Delhi in 1963.
Obama is the only US president to make two official visits to India. On his first visit in 2010, Obama landed in Mumbai instead of Delhi as a show of solidarity following the Mumbai terror attacks of 2008, which killed 166 people.
