Vice President Kamala Harris has remained poised under pressure during an intense campaign, reminding listeners of Donald Trump’s record as president and promising that, if elected, she will work for them. Harris has credited her passion for public service to her mother, the Indian-born cancer scientist Dr. Shyamala Gopalan Harris, who frequently told her, “Don’t just sit around and complain …. Do something!”
Gopalan Harris was one resolute South Asian woman. As a teenager, she left a seaside city in South India to cross oceans and pursue her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. She married Donald Harris, whom she met at a civil rights protest, had two daughters, and named her firstborn Kamala Devi Harris.
As an anthropologist of South Asia, an Indian-American, and the mother of two brown children, I want to pause for a moment on that middle name.
Devi, in Sanskrit, means “goddess.” In the Hindu tradition, goddesses abound. Picture Saraswati, the goddess of learning, seated on a white lotus surrounded by books and plucking the strings of a veena. Laxmi, the goddess of wealth and prosperity, resplendent in red and carrying lotus flowers in two of her four arms. And Kali, the goddess of protection, garlanded with a necklace of human skulls, her red tongue protruding from her mouth. These formidable deities are incarnations of feminine power, respected and revered.
But Devi can also refer to the perils of goddess worship.
In Satyajit Ray’s iconic 1960 film Devi, a young wife is believed by her father-in-law to be an embodiment of the goddess Kali. As his delusion grows, the woman is confined by her family to an altar where community members visit to worship and touch her feet. The ailing are sent to be healed by her. Increasingly, the woman becomes isolated, lonely, and lost. Her fate is sealed when her own beloved nephew falls sick with a fever. Instead of calling the doctor, the family waits for the Devi’s divine touch to heal the boy. But she is unable to cure the child, who is dead by morning, and the grieving woman is consumed by the horror of what Devi worship has done.
South Asia is a place of contradiction. Often highlighted in Western media as a land of entrenched patriarchy and low female labor participation and literacy, it also has a history of female leadership (Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, and the first woman prime minister in the world, Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Sri Lanka), of women’s cultural and intellectual accomplishment, and of varied, vibrant worship of the feminine divine. Women can be God. Women can be democratically elected leaders. But, thanks to widespread patriarchal norms and a misogynistic justice system, women are also not safe in the streets or, often, in their own homes.
My husband and I named our daughter after the Hindu goddess Durga, a symbol of shakti (feminine strength) often depicted with ten hands, each carrying a trademark weapon, riding a lion, with hair flowing freely. We named her, too, after my maternal grandmother Durga, who grew up during the 1943 Bengal Famine and suffered from being fed last and educated least because she was a girl. We thought a lot about encumbering our daughter with a name with lofty mythological significance. And we were well aware of the Devi trap of calling women goddesses while treating them terribly. Yet we chose to give her a goddess name to honor the possibility of strength and power married with grace, goodness, and tradition.
In Indian mythology, Devis are summoned in times of distress. When a situation is on the brink of disaster, Devis save us. In many ways, Harris feels poised to save us. We gravitate towards her seeking hope, reassurance, and protection.
But we should not make the mistake of putting her (or women in power, or anyone, really) on a pedestal and expecting her to be flawless. As Michelle Obama said of Harris and Walz in her speech at the Democratic National Convention, these energized leaders are “still only human. They are not perfect. And like all of us, they will make mistakes.”
Harris circumvents the Devi trap by being more than the sum of her parts. She wears her intersecting identities lightly and takes her work seriously. Her opponents may label her as “conveniently Indian” or “not-Black enough,” but these insults reveal the discomfort of those who wield them. And fortunately, they don’t seem to ruffle Harris’ feathers.
As the daughter of first-generation immigrants and a Black and brown woman raised by a strong mother, she doesn’t bend to people’s image of what she should be or claim to be a savior. I hope voters in November will see Harris’ call to “chart a course for the future” not as a pledge to magically fix all of society’s problems but as an invitation to work together on solutions that will improve our lives now and for later generations.
Because that’s the thing about goddesses: we build worlds, rather than letting worlds (and words) define us. When my 4-year-old points to the television screen and excitedly shouts “Auntie Kamala,” I want her to know this: that real shakti is the courage and freedom to be who we are without falling into the trap of needing to be perfect. And that is worth far more than a spot on anyone’s pedestal.