Indian Villagers Celebrate VP Nominee Kamala Harris With Banners And Prayers

The decision by presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden to pick Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., as his running mate has resonated all the way Painganadu, Harris’s ancestral village in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu.

Residents of the village are rooting for her, putting up signs and banners celebrating Harris, who is of Indian descent on her mother’s sides. Elsewhere, in the village of Rameswaram, specials prayers and rituals have also been conducted to help Harris secure victory alongside Biden.

“[Harris has] gone to the level of contesting for a vice-presidential candidate in America. Naturally, the villagers are very happy,” Ramanan, a trustee for a Painganadu temple who goes by one name, said in an interview with Reuters.

Born in Oakland, California, Harris is the daughter of Donald J. Harris, a Jamaican immigrant and professor of economics at Stanford University, and Shyamala Gopalan, an Indian immigrant and biologist. Gopalan traces her ancestry to Painganadu, and Harris regularly visited it as a child with her maternal grandfather, P. V. Gopalan, a high-ranking government official in India.

The village of Trichy in Tamil Nadu, where P. V. Gopalan was born, has also erected banners celebrating Harris’s success. Some have read, “PV Gopalan’s granddaughter is victorious,” according to the Hindustan.

Harris will be the first woman of color nominated for the position of Vice President by the Democratic Party.