Like Kamala, I know the power of Indian mothers
The vice-presidential candidate has the most potent weapon for success of all, says Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal
Itold friends four years ago that Kamala Devi Harris, Joe Biden’s running mate, would be US president – which, given his frailty and Donald Trump’s low polling, could happen sooner than you might imagine.
Harris, then largely unknown, even in America, I realised had been blessed with that most potent weapon for success: a dedicated and ambitious Indian mother.
Like her, I am the first-born of an Indian émigré woman and know what a terrific yet burdensome asset that is. If Indians don’t jest about our exacting mothers as often en as Jewish people do, it’s because we’re too exhausted from meeting their expectations.
Much has been said about Harris becoming the first black woman vicepresidential candidate
– not least by Trump himself, who last week repeated his campaign’s s discredited “birther” theory that she is not eligible to run for office, , as her parents weren’t US citizens when she was born. Harris’s father is Jamaican and she embraces aces her black identity; raised d amid the racial strife of America in the Sixties and nd Seventies, where very few ew Indians lived then, she had no other people to call her own.
But it was her mother, Shyamala Gopalan – who died in 2009, having raised Harris and younger sister, Maya, alone after divorcing their father when Harris was only seven – who was her overwhelming formative influence; a woman Harris describes as “the reason for everything”. In her 2019 memoir, she wrote: “There is no title or honour on earth I’ll treasure more than to say I am Shyamala Gopalan Harris’s daughter.”
A classically trained singer and practising Hindu, Shyamala graduated from the University of Delhi at the young age of 19, to then go and earn a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, where she met Harris’s father, Donald. After their divorce, she would become a leading cancer specialist.
The brilliance and chutzpah required of any woman to achieve such things is exceptional, let alone one from the impoverished and tradition-bound trad India of the Sixties, where w even affluent families like Shyamala’s could rarely own o basic goods like a fridge or television set. Westerners We mistakenly think of Indian women as the door matdoorm products of a patriarchal patri society; in truth, they are the resolute backbone bac of a rising India, and of the remarkable success suc of its émigrés around ar the world. Behind every ev high-achieving Indian In – be it Chancellor Rishi R Sunak, Republican Party star Nikki Haley or Google CEO Sundar Pichai – you will find a mother who inspired, supported and, when required, berated and guilt-tripped her offspring to reach their potential. While Harris’s stellar singlegeneration ascent may seem unusual, it is the norm for Indians in the US, where the community is now the most educated and highest earning in the country – thanks to its mothers.
My CV doesn’t compare with Harris’s but, like her, whatever I’ve achieved owes much to my mother’s dogged belief and assistance. My own,
Surinder Kaur Sidhu, was born in 1952, and was among the first girls to receive any education in her rural Punjabi village; the last of 10 children my grandmother bore, half of whom she’d already seen die. Without electricity or running water, survival there required a harsh daily toil.
My mother dreamed of becoming a teacher while doing well at school, which, for much of her childhood, consisted of taking down lessons on a wooden slat, washed between classes, while sat under a tree. A brick structure in which to study, but without chairs and desks, only arrived towards the end of her schooldays.
The poverty and simplicity of that world is impossible for me to imagine. Everyday she woke at dawn to chop fodder and tend buffaloes before going to school. She wouldn’t see a film until, aged 16, she went to a cinema that was a two-hour bus ride away.
When state-funded schooling began after independence, my grandfather was adamant that she would be educated, not illiterate like he and his wife.
Britain had left its former colony with a literacy rate well below 20 per cent, and almost zero among women. But he died when my mother was only 15, and my grandmother, panicking for the future, took my mother out of school at 17, wanting to prepare her for marriage instead. She rebelled in the only way possible – demanding to be married to someone abroad, where she might have more freedom.
That would happen in London, in 1973, with my father, then a squaddie with the Gloucestershire Regiment. It hasn’t been the escape she hoped for. My father struggled terribly throughout their still-ongoing marriage with issues including addiction, mental illness, cancer and insolvency. She would raise her four children effectively on her own, while helping him survive his troubles.
Speaking no English and receiving no outside support, she managed to hold her family together and push her children – through inducement, encouragement, hysterical browbeatings and guilt-inducing weeping fits – to make something of themselves.
However broke our household was, she always found money to pay for books, school trips, tuition and anything else our educations required. I eventually became a writer, my brother a City accountant and my sisters a social worker and an English
She pushed us to achieve through hysterical browbeatings and guiltinduced weeping
teacher. Our mother’s unwavering commitment to her family has been a cause of both awe and shame, as I, like most Indians, think of how much she sacrificed, and what more I should have done to make her proud. Driven by that same angst, “What would amma think?” has been Harris’s constant question throughout life (“amma” being the word for mum in her mother’s native Tamil).
Mine has not been a perfect mother; the beatings and emotional trauma she inflicted, common among her generation, left their mark. My difficulties with depression and relationships, I know through years of therapy, are rooted in how I was parented. That I have never dated an Indian woman points to this, too.
But I cannot deny that she enabled me to achieve and experience more than might reasonably be expected from someone of my background. And my fluency with Hindi and Punjabi are her most cherished gifts to me – I’ve never spoken English with her, though she speaks it well now – opening India and its culture up for me to marvel at and explore.
Indeed, my experience may be the basis for a new career, as I consider taking a counselling course myself, wanting to help others and knowing what a market exists of Indians who want to relinquish the internalised pressure that drove them upwards and simply enjoy life.
I write this while looking at Harris’s latest Instagram post of herself as a baby with raven-haired Shyamala, dressed in a traditional salwar-kameez, appearing much like my mother did in her 20s.
The accompanying words read: “My mother always used to say: ‘Don’t just sit around and complain about things. Do something.’ I dearly wish she were with us this week.”
That blunt, no-nonsense approach is standard Indian mothering. None of the upsets or disadvantages I have faced posed by class, race or any other matter have been a reason for apathy, bitterness or failure in my mother’s eyes.
Given the paucity of opportunities she grew up with, she regards my life as a series of untaken chances and not a struggle against the odds. Some might call that a pitiless attitude, but it has been the making of countless Indians – and maybe of me, too, one day.