After Harris, Biden’s 200-yr-old city roots

LONDON/CHENNAI: Ever since the US President-elect Joe Biden named Kamal Harris his vice-presidential running mate, her connection to India, especially Chennai, became a talking point for many Indians across the globe. Harris, too, spoke movingly of her discussions with her grandfather PV Gopalan as they walked along the beach at Chennai. In a remarkable coincidence, reports have surfaced about Biden’s ancestral connection, yet again with Madras. His kin too may have strolled along the same stretch of sand two centuries before.

Biden had first made the claim of an Indian connection in the year 2013. Two years later he elaborated that he was descended from George Biden, his “great, great, great, great, great grandfather” who was a Captain in the East India Company. After retirement George decided to settle in India and married an Indian woman. Tim Willasey-Wilsey, a visiting professor at the Department of War Studies, King’s College, London, who has written on Biden’s Chennai connection, further said, “There are no records of a George Biden in India but there were two Bidens who became Captains of East India Company armed merchant ships (known as Indiamen). They were brothers. Both started out as humble Third and Fourth Mates in their early teens on the arduous route between London and India via the Cape of Good Hope.”

The President had also claimed that a few of his distant family members now reside in Mumbai. Decades after he acquired a letter from somebody by the final identify of Biden from Mumbai, Biden had realised that his “great, great, great, great, great grandfather” had laboured within the East India Company.

Biden had said that he was descended from George Biden, his great, great, great, great, great grandfather who was a Captain in the East India Company