An Unstoppable Behemoth: The American Melting Pot |
vOver the last eighteen-odd months, much ink has been spilled over the 2024 election and the conditions that converged to elevate the twice-impeached Donald J. Trump to the presidency for a second term. An intriguing element in any examination of this seminal election, which one would be forgiven for dismissing as a mere trivia nugget, is that Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, and J.D. Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee, both have ties to states in India’s southern region. That’s not all, though. Both these candidates’ Indian ties involve a specific community that constitutes a small minority in India. This community is the Brahmin varna (a Sanskrit word referring to a particular segment of society; often perfunctorily translated in Western parlance as “caste”).
Kamala Harris’ connection with India and the Brahmin varna stems from her mother, Dr. Shyamala Gopalan Harris, who was born in British-ruled India in 1938, in what is now the southern state of Tamil Nadu. Shyamala’s father, P.V. Gopalan, was a high-level bureaucrat in India’s civil service during British rule and later in independent India. A 2019 profile of P.V. Gopalan in the Los Angeles Times, penned during Kamala Harris’ first presidential campaign, noted that he “was a Brahmin, part of a privileged elite in Hinduism’s ancient caste hierarchy.” The Times profile went on to explain how Shyamala’s life journey ran counter to what it characterized as the rigid orthodoxy typical of the Brahmin community. For instance, it underscored that Shyamala applied to a master’s degree program at the University of California, Berkeley, when she was only nineteen, and made the journey alone to the United States from India when she was accepted. Once at Berkeley, Shyamala became involved with the then-brewing Civil Rights Movement in the United States; this activism led her to become acquainted with and eventually marry Donald Harris, a fellow Berkeley student from Jamaica. Kamala Harris and her sister Maya were the offspring of this (relatively short-lived) union. Academically, though, Shyamala was quite successful, earning her doctorate at Berkeley and becoming a renowned cancer researcher.
Shyamala Harris herself was quite cognizant of the ramifications of her marriage. In a 2003 interview with SF Weekly, she stated, “In Indian society we go by birth.” Speaking about her own lineage, Shyamala told the publication that “[w]e are Brahmins, that is the top caste. Please do not confuse this with class, which is only about money. For Brahmins, the bloodline is the most important. My family, named Gopalan, goes back more than 1,000 years.” Shyamala’s assertion that Indian society is dictated by birth alone and her reference to the Brahmin varna as “the top caste” represents an oversimplification of the complex Indian varna system. Be that as it may, Shyamala’s reference to her family’s millennium-old lineage is of particular interest.
Considering the hereditary nature of the occupations that typified a jati and the distinctiveness of the traditions that developed among various communities, it is no surprise that endogamy was the norm. In particular, the Brahmin varna was traditionally charged with the recitation of the Vedas, which form the bedrock of the Hindu scriptural corpus; these texts were transmitted orally from generation to generation. Brahmins were also traditionally appointed as priests in Hindu temples and as Vedic scholars and teachers. Both of these tasks required adherence to sometimes exacting ritual codes, which played a part in creating a distinctive Brahmin subculture within the broader realm of Indian society. Marrying outside of the Brahmin varna could also prevent a young man from receiving the sacred initiation (known as the upanayanam) required to conduct the daily rituals that made one eligible for Vedic recitation or the priesthood. These circumstances led to the preservation of an unbroken lineage in most Brahmin families over generations, with Shyamala’s ancestors being no exception.
Until Shyamala herself came along, of course. She chose to break from the lineage and depart from a millennium of tradition — in the name of love.
If that culmination sounds dramatic, like it was pulled out of the pages of a sappy romance novel, I apologize. The question that arises from this discussion, though, is a serious one: Why did Shyamala make the decision to break with tradition? And what broader implications does the answer to that question have for our understanding of American multiculturalism?
Before I venture to answer that question (or perhaps in the course of answering it), let me tell you a story about another Brahmin woman who also chose to depart from her ancestral lineage. Meet Usha Chilukuri Vance, the wife of Vice President Vance and the Second Lady of the United States. In the wake of then-Senator Vance’s selection as the Republican vice presidential nominee, Indian circles on social media were abuzz regarding Usha Vance’s varna identity. Smita Prakash, a prominent Indian journalist, posted on X, nodding to the fact that the hunt for Usha Vance’s identity may have been Americans’ first brush with the complexities of India’s varna structure. Based on the assertions of Razib Khan, a prominent researcher and writer, who attributes his information to Senator Vance himself, and my own analysis of the Second Lady’s ancestry based on media interviews with one of her family members in India, I have concluded with reasonable certainty that Usha’s family belongs to the Brahmin varna.
Usha Vance was born in the mid-1980s, about a half-century after Shyamala, in California to Drs. Radhakrishna “Krish” and Lakshmi Chilukuri, immigrants from the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. While Krish Chilukuri is an aerospace engineer by profession and now serves as a lecturer at San Diego State University, his wife is a molecular biologist who serves as provost of Sixth College at the University of California, San Diego. Usha Vance herself studied history at Yale University as an undergraduate and obtained her law degree at Yale Law School.
It was at Yale Law that Usha Vance met her future husband, a White, ancestrally Christian man from Ohio who grew up in less-than-fortunate circumstances. The two married in 2014, and a Hindu ceremony was part of the wedding rituals. An NBC news profile of Usha Vance noted that she is a “practicing Hindu” who, by her own account, was also raised in a practicing Hindu household. Even after her marriage, she has evidently upheld some elements of her Telugu Brahmin identity; in her speech to the Republican National Convention introducing her husband, she indicated that she is vegetarian, as members of the community typically are.
JD Vance’s much-publicized statement late last year, where he revealed that he wished his Hindu wife would accept the truth of the Christian gospel and “see it the same way” as he did, adds another layer of complexity to this narrative. This public pronouncement by the Vice President, who is a convert to Catholicism and has a book coming out about his faith journey in June, exposes the stark differences between Hindu and Christian approaches to proselytization and the primacy of one’s own religious path. While the Hindu framework allows for recognizing many religious paths as valid means to reaching the Divine, mainstream Christianity does not usually offer such leeway. The friction between these divergent religious approaches typifies the conflicts that can arise in many interfaith marriages between adherents of proselytizing and non-proselytizing faiths. It was not just Usha Vance’s Brahmin lineage that was called into question through her marriage with J.D.; her identity as a Hindu, too, needed to be reckoned with.
Now that I have told Usha Vance’s story in brief, we are left once again to confront the questions I had framed earlier, albeit with another figure in the mix: Why did Shyamala Harris and Usha Vance break millennia of tradition through their marriages, and what does it say about America’s claim to fame as a giant cultural melting pot?
Perhaps the first question is more straightforward to tackle. Shyamala Harris and Usha Vance were both Indian-Americans, though in different eras, who were balancing a dual national and cultural identity. It is worth noting that, when Harris arrived in the United States, Indian immigration to the United States was nascent. It picked up speed in the 1980s and 1990s, fueled by the global IT boom, and it has been going strong ever since. For Shyamala Harris, who was born and raised in India, the duality of her Indian and American identities may have been even more pronounced. As her own remarks indicate, she was certainly aware of the unbroken lineage that her Brahmin family back home boasted. But Vice President Harris’ own remarks paint her parents’ rendezvous and ultimate union as an all-American love story that could transcend barriers of varna and nationality. They “fell in love in that most American way while marching together for justice and the civil rights movement,” she figures. Perhaps there is more than a kernel of truth to this idealistic storyline. A young, impressionable Shyamala, likely venturing outside her country for the first time, was swept up in the fervor of the Civil Rights Movement, which she saw as directly affecting her, given that she was perceived as a person of color (even if not Black) and was discriminated against as a result. All of a sudden, varna became an inconsequential vestige of the Old World and pan-Brown/Black solidarity became the new order.
For Usha Vance, the storyline may not have been nearly as dramatic. Given that she was born and raised in the United States, her parents would have had to instill a sense of varna identity in her quite deliberately. Had she grown up in India, though, the social milieu would likely have cultivated such an identity in her organically, just as it did for her parents. Put differently, in the United States, the natural order of things would not have been for Vance to take personal ownership of her family’s unbroken Brahmin lineage. The Chilukuris apparently emphasized academic success as a virtue for their daughter, as is typical for Indian immigrant parents, and she delivered amply in that regard. Amidst the myriad of possibilities and opportunities that the United States offered the Chilukuris, varna — which suddenly may have seemed like a relic of the Old World that had little relevance to this exciting new world — could well have taken a backseat. And by the time that Usha had gotten to law school, maybe academic ambition had fully overridden considerations of lineage. Both J.D. and Usha were at one of the country’s best law schools. They had a fire in their belly. They wanted to go places and do great things. And, at that point, varna paled in comparison. Vance maintaining her Hinduism and her vegetarianism was some solace. In fact, J.D. himself credits Usha’s support (and by extension, her own religious core) in his “rediscovery” of Christianity as an adult. And the couple’s three kids? The older two have already been baptized into the Catholic Church, with their mother’s Hindu roots likely being relegated to a mere footnote in their own lives. But, for Usha and J.D., this was a compromise worth making, in the name of ambition and love.
The theories above are mere conjectures about the lives of individual people, of course; educated guesses shaped by the information we do have and a smidge of my own experience and common sense. But what broader conclusions can we draw from these individual narratives about America’s nature as a melting pot?
Let me say this for starters: the American melting pot is unstoppable. It roars along, whittling down ethnic divides, generation by generation. After all, it took only a single generation to end the Gopalans’ millennium-old unbroken lineage. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so uncharitable, though. To frame the same development more optimistically, I could say this: the great American melting pot melded the hoary Hindu traditions of the Gopalans with the distinctive Jamaican culture of the Harrises to create something uniquely American — our first Black, South-Asian, female vice president. Is the melting pot a crucible that enables a metamorphosis like no other? Or is it a cultural destroyer that can only come up with a hodgepodge of identities and cultures, all of which are incomplete? Can it only create children who know bits and pieces of Tamil and Telugu; who are too Brahmin but not Brahmin enough? In a related sense, is the loss of communitarian identity an acceptable price to pay for the unity that is forged in its wake?
It’s a matter of perspective, I would figure. Just like the eternal glass half full/half empty parable. And there’s probably a little bit of truth to both views. These observations, of course, don’t apply merely to the relatively small Brahmin community in India and the Brahmin diaspora in the United States. They extend to any other ethnic or cultural group that has come to the United States over the centuries. The Jewish community, a multi-ethnic and multidenominational religious group that came through Ellis Island in large numbers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, represents another prime example. Over time, lines of national identity have largely blurred among the community. Nowadays, most American Jews aren’t even marrying other Jews. A 2020 Pew Research study says this: “Fully 42% of all currently married Jewish respondents indicate they have a non-Jewish spouse. Among those who have gotten married since 2010, 61% are intermarried.” Yet it is a distinctively American version of Jewish culture that has become an intrinsic part of America’s mosaic identity.
In any event, there is still a burgeoning South Indian Brahmin community in the United States. There are classes at various Hindu temples that teach recitation of the Vedas and other traditional Brahmin methods of worship. An online marriage service for Telugu Brahmin diaspora youth to find partners within their varna has sprung up over the last few years. I think the founders of that service are still wary of the melting pot. Evidently, they figure that they can still preserve their millennia-old lineage in a foreign land. The “arranged-lite” setup that diaspora marital services like this one facilitate represents a blend of tradition and modernity; while the families facilitate the initial meeting, it is the prospective spouses themselves that “date” for a period of time in pursuit of marriage.
Maybe the Jewish intermarriage statistics will daunt these traditionalists, though. Will that be the Telugu Brahmin community’s position in another century, in the United States? A 2023 study from the Institute for Jewish Policy Research makes this observation: “Jewish populations with the lowest levels of intermarriage are those with the highest levels of traditionalism.” Intuitively, that makes sense. Maybe these Indian-American communities should be taking notes on how to save their lineages in the United States, if they are so inclined.
It’s not all doom and gloom, though, for those looking to swim against the tide. Perhaps the founders of the Telugu Brahmin matrimonial service can draw some reassurance from another American political story. Vivek Ramaswamy, a 2024 Republican presidential contender and a gubernatorial candidate in Ohio this year, is from a Brahmin family hailing from the southern Indian state of Kerala. His wife, Apoorva Tewari, is also from a Brahmin family, though from the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Deliberately or not, the Ramaswamys, two high-achieving individuals that, by all appearances, have achieved the proverbial American Dream, were brought together in an endogamous, intra-Brahmin union. Apparently, something happened in their lives that did not happen with Shyamala Harris or Usha Vance.
Perhaps, then, for the founders of the Telugu Brahmin matrimonial service and others in the United States like them, the Ramaswamys’ story offers a glimmer of hope. Maybe, just maybe, they can still dream of beating the seemingly unstoppable melting pot.