Sen. Kamala Harris speaks with MSNBC host Chris Matthews in Miami, June 27, 2019.
Photo: saul loeb/Agence France-Presse/Getty ImagesJoe Biden has revealed the identity of his running mate: Sen. Kamala Devi Harris. Why did he take so long to decide? Maybe he needed time to learn how to say her name.
How do you say Kamala? It’s an Indian name, proof that Ms. Harris’s dual ethnicity can’t be written out of the script in the racially absolutist politics of the U.S. Her mother—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 deity of wealth and fortune. The word Kamala literally means “she of the lotus,” the flower on which Lakshmi is said to repose in the Hindu heavens.
As her name floods the news, I wince each time it is uttered by anchors and politicians who mangle the stress of its vowels. It is pronounced “comma-la—like the punctuation mark,” Ms. Harris explains in her memoir, not “Camel-ah,” to rhyme with Pamela, or even “come-AAH-lah,” the commonest mispronunciation.
To make matters complicated: That last sounding of syllables was the way in which James Harris, a professional wrestler from Senatobia, Miss., nicknamed “The Ugandan Giant,” pronounced his stage name—which, bafflingly, was “Kamala.” A giant black man as the Lady of the Lotus? Perhaps his handlers confused 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 first name to “Kampala,” so much so that “Kampala Harris” was trending on Twitter. It can only have been by cosmic alignment that Mr. Harris the wrestler died two days before Ms. Harris the politician was nominated. He was 70.
There are other ironies. Ms. Harris’s progressive economic beliefs sit awkwardly with her being named for a goddess of wealth creation. And her mother, Shyamala Gopalan (her first name is pronounced “Shyaa-muh-lah”), was an Iyer Brahmin, at the pinnacle of the caste structure of her native Tamil Nadu, a state in south India. The complex politics of that region have caused many Tamil Brahmins to seek their fortunes elsewhere, including Silicon Valley. Gopalan, who died in 2009, was a medical researcher at the University of California, Berkeley.
The pronunciation of Ms. Harris’s name is, to be sure, a trivial aspect of her political adventure. More fraught by far is the extent to which she can—and must—calibrate her Indianness on the American political stage. For an ethnic group that is more successful materially in the U.S. than virtually any other, Indian-Americans are a strikingly anti-Republican bunch: 84% voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Ms. Harris doesn’t need to play to that ethnic gallery, especially as it is a tiny fraction of the electorate.
Instead, she must play up her paternal side—African, via her Jamaican father. The Democrats are a party of ethnic hierarchies, in which smaller ethnicities—such as Indians—must efface themselves and wait their turn. It is ironic that the party many Indian-Americans disdain is the one to have given this country two Indian-American governors (Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Nikki Haley of South Carolina).
It’s not inconceivable that in 2024, America could have to choose 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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