Shyamala Gopalan’s time at Berkeley, especially the heady 1958-60 period coincided with my late father’s time in Berkeley, and would be fascinating to learn more about from contemporaries still alive.
Tokyo: If one speculated that two foreign students would come to a major economy, marry and produce a daughter who would go on to become Vice President of the country, and potentially the President, most people around the world would surmise that it is an irrational dream that never happens—but that is precisely what was accomplished in the United States, the world’s largest economy. Perhaps nowhere else in the world might that have been possible. Shyamala Gopalan from India and Donald Harris, another Berkeley student, from Jamaica, met, married and their elder daughter Kamala Harris is now increasingly the face of the Biden-Harris Administration.
Shyamala Gopalan arrived at Berkeley from India as a spirited 19-year-old to do her Master’s degree in 1958, when my late father, V.J. Chacko was the Indian Students Association president of the University of California, Berkeley, then doing his PhD in Statistics on a Fulbright scholarship. V.J. Chacko was married, had been an Additional Professor of Statistics at Madras University, already had two children (who were being taken care of by relatives in India) and I was conceived in Berkeley (in the apartment you can see in the photograph behind my parents). Then as it is today, the cost of healthcare was frightening in the US. Healthcare cost in the US is today the single largest cause of personal bankruptcy and so V.J. Chacko sent my mother by ship via Yokohama for my birth to then cost-effective, health-wise, India. I was born a week after his thesis defence—the thesis defence is among the most stressful days of a scholar’s life—as eminent faculty come to have an intellectual feast at the expense of the sweating candidate for PhD. V.J. Chacko’s PhD thesis advisers were Professors Neyman and Lehmann, among the most illustrious scholars in statistics worldwide, both Jewish-Americans, and for the remaining 12 years of V.J. Chacko’s life he dutifully and reverentially sent them hand-written New Year cards, even from Accra, Ghana, where he passed away in 1972 while serving (1967-1972) as a UNDP expert on building statistical (in today’s parlance, data sciences including mainframe computer technology) capacity both at the University of Ghana as a Professor, and as a high-level Advisor with the Government of Ghana’s National Statistics and Planning system, on deputation from the Indian Statistical Service. V.J. Chacko, fired up with idealism and enthusiasm to contribute to the then “New India” of the 1960s, produced India’s first manual on statistical sampling techniques for forest surveys—the first attempt to document and manage independent India’s forest wealth, multiple other papers in major journals, and even a paper on Swedish forests, among the first by a scholar of an institution in the global “South” on the “North”. He, however, provided constructive criticism to a fact-finding body which had come to his Central Government R&D Institute, about the mismatch between the qualifications of department heads and their institute functions. Instead of welcoming the idealistic commentary and using that obvious lacunae to rearrange faculty and recruit others as well, many at the institute decided to teach the young upstart a lesson, and the then prevailing anti-US and pro-USSR bent in India made it easy to attack a US-returned PhD who had been on a Fulbright scholarship. The inability to stomach constructive criticism is a bane of India, but it is not just restricted to India. V.J. Chacko then took up the UN assignment in Ghana, where he passed away after 5 years there. I was 12 years old and studying in Ghana at the time. Interestingly, Shyamala’s father P.V. Gopalan was sent in the late 1960s on deputation from Government of India to Lusaka, Zambia to help resettle African refugees from neighbouring Rhodesia, that had broken away from the British Empire as an unrecognized, apartheid nation led by White settlers in 1965. India had long-standing ties to freedom movements and all post-Independence Indian governments supported Africa in decolonization and against apartheid. Kamala and her sister Maya also spent time then in Lusaka on holidays with their grandparents.
Shyamala and my mother Gracy shared a love for South Indian Carnatic music. Shyamala was a gifted singer and had learned it from her mother Rajam. Shymala had performed on All India Radio, earning a small bit of cash. Gracy formally studied the musical instrument Veena and Carnatic music at the Swati Thirunal Music Academy in Trivandrum, founded by the last reigning King of Travancore, Sree Chithira Thirunal Balarama Varma in 1939. V.J. Chacko persuaded Gracy to play the Veena and sing at the Berkeley Indian Students Association gatherings he had to organize as its president.
While researching for this article, and also thinking about how to honour the memory of V.J. Chacko 50 years after his passing next year, I found to my great surprise that there appears to be no annual remembrance in the public domain for Shyamala—there may well be private functions. Presumably, public functions will be up and running when Kamala Harris has more time beyond her current very hectic schedule. Several times, I had myself attempted to organize public functions in V.J. Chacko’s memory, only to have circumstances make it impossible.
When Shyamala died in 2009 aged 70 of complications of colon cancer, the grassroots organization Breast Cancer Action (BC Action) founded in 1990 by women who were living with and dying from breast cancer and who demanded answers about their disease, announced that Shyamala was “an activist to the end, and in lieu of flowers, Shyamala requested that donations be made to BC Action”. In tribute, they described Shyamala’s scientific life work “in isolating and characterizing the progesterone receptor gene that transformed the medical establishment’s understanding of the hormone-responsiveness of breast tissue. Her discovery sparked many advances regarding the role of progesterone and its cellular receptor in breast biology and cancer”.
I was reminded of how the Kennedy family honours its departed loved ones—they prefer to remember the birthdays and not the death anniversaries. Once, while waiting for a function to start honouring JFK, the late President, at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, I bumped into John F. Kennedy, Jr., lounging against a wall while waiting for his aunts Eunice and Jean to arrive, I asked him, because he too lost his father at a young age, on his memories. He replied that his memories of his late father were not plentiful but were nonetheless rich memories. And they make it a point to have a public function to honour and remember.
The atmosphere, however, continues to be very polarized in the US—there have always been stases and tensions that preoccupy incoming administrations and departing officials seeking new pastures. Time and again this phase in history has been the most dangerous, especially for those who count on US support. As an example, Patrice Lumumba, the nationalist Prime Minister of the Congo came to Washington DC in July 1960 seeking support in the dying days of the Eisenhower Administration, but the establishment was too preoccupied to spend much time or attention on him. Lumumba then was forced to seek USSR support, that made him persona non grata in that era with the UN that was a veiled front for the West. In January 1961, days before the inauguration of the incoming Kennedy Administration, when the “Bay of Pigs” crisis in Cuba was brewing, Lumumba was captured, tortured and killed in breakaway Katanga, sparking a Congo crisis that has still not been fully resolved even today.
Most Indians are astonished when reminded that India was on the losing side of Cold War 1.0, since they believed that India was non-aligned—and remember the relentless rhetoric of Prime Ministers Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Vajpayee et al. The Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation between India and the USSR, dated August 9, 1971 was in effect for 20 years till the USSR was formally dissolved in December 1991; indeed, Article IX of the Treaty specifically states, “In the event of either Party (India or USSR) being subjected to an attack or a threat thereof, the High Contracting Parties shall immediately enter into consultations in order to remove such threat and take appropriate effective measures to ensure peace and the security of their countries.” It cannot be more explicit that it was a defence treaty that tied India to the USSR. But it was also very understandable as it came just before the Bangladesh war, when India entered into then-East Pakistan in support of the “Mukti Bahini” freedom fighters and to end the genocide and mayhem against them and the pro-independence civilian population by military forces from then-West Pakistan. Pakistan was a SEATO Defence Treaty member along with the US, and therefore India had to counter that, since war was imminent and did happen in December 1971. The duo of then-President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger repeatedly threatened India and PM Mrs Indira Gandhi, in expletive-laden White House tirades that have subsequently been made public. Nevertheless, Kissinger, among the greatest spinmeisters of our times, has reinvented himself as a genial elderly statesman and long-forgotten are those threats and the sending of the US Seventh Fleet to the Bay of Bengal, and all the illegal napalm and carpet bombings in the Far East, and replaced with smiles and evening cocktails in New Delhi with the glitterati—after all Kissinger even won the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize! But for India, then having to confront a SEATO Treaty member, Pakistan, meant having to join or create a rival alliance. So India had to join with the USSR—that is how it came to be on the losing side of Cold War 1.0. But is there a need to persist in that old strategy even in Cold War 2.0 now underway between the democracies and dictatorships in the Asia-Pacific? Even today, most comfortable Indians ensconced in the Lutyens Zone cannot fathom how many billions of dollars of lost investment and consequent opportunity cost to India’s budding entrepreneurs and young people was the real consequence of being on the losing side of Cold War 1.0 Every day, Japanese preface every categorical statement with recalling their history of defeat in World War II, but I have never, ever, heard a reflective word from India’s elite on having participated, perhaps inadvertently, in Cold War 1.0.
After all, the USSR was not known as a great foreign investor thought it had advanced technological universities, and PRC’s self-adulatory statistics often need to be taken with a fist-full of salt, not merely a pinch—and there is no need to add to the worldwide commentary on the fate of its prominent tycoons like Jack Ma. Now that Cold War 2.0 is underway, with China, Russia and Pakistan aligned on one side and the US and its allies and partners on the other side—will India again feign non-alignment, or attempted equi-distancing between the two blocs, and yet again fail to realize the investment potential that India has often been linked with that has yet to be fully realized?
There are about 4 million Indian-Americans and others of Indian ancestry in the US. In her book “The Truths We Hold: An American Journey”, Kamala Harris neatly phrases the issue of immigration to the US as “with the exception of Native Americans, we all descend from people who weren’t born on our shores—whether our ancestors came to America willingly, with hopes of a prosperous future, or forcibly, on a slave ship, or desperately, to escape a harrowing past”.
During his Presidency that evoked such great enthusiasm, worldwide, President Obama appeared to have been sucked into the vortex of the Washington DC beltway, where the Deep State, political class, lawyers & lobbyists, mega-financiers, mainstream media and increasingly, social media, all battle one another in a no-holds-barred Wild West-style shootout, constantly. Being in the whirlpool left him little time to pay attention to Africa where the entire continent looked up to him in anticipation of what all he might have done, beyond promoting the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) since his late father came from Kenya, also as a foreign student. Even post-Presidency, Obama has not really reached out much to Africa, perhaps once again being caught in the internecine warfare that is part and parcel of the Washington DC daily routine. It also reflects the reality that President Obama had so little experience, almost none with Africa, before he became President. I recall seeing his near-barren Senate office from which he soon started a run for the Presidency, not having time in the Senate either. However, it is said that those whose childhood is strained (he lost his father for all practical purposes soon after his birth, but did have a resolute mother) are protected by “higher authorities”.
The Berkeley milieu where Shyamala met Donald Harris was their joint interest in “black” studies. Their marriage was brief, and they soon separated, divorced, and Shyamala brought up her two daughters as Indian-American and Black-American, telling her daughters that they did not need to prove they are one or the other. Donald Harris is today a distinguished Professor Emeritus of Economics.
Apart from her half-Indian DNA, Kamala’s heritage includes her “black” Jamaican ancestry that is interspersed with African history, especially Ghana, from where a large percentage of Jamaicans originate. The capture or purchase and export of black Africans by ship to Europe can be traced back to Portuguese vessels since 1444, long before the US existed. The first slave and gold trading “castle” in West Africa was built at Elmina, Ghana, by the Portuguese in 1482. The major Atlantic slave trading nations, ordered by trade volume, were the Portuguese, British, Spanish, French, Dutch, and Danish. But people from every European nation participated actively. The abhorrent enslavement of Sub-Saharan Africans by Libyans and Egyptians can be traced back to 8000 BC. The empires of Greece and Rome (and many other empires around the world) enslaved those they defeated in wars, of every race. People in India today would be horrified to learn that Indian textiles were important items used by European slave traders to trade with African kings and local warlords for African captives sold as slaves. Caribbean rum was another item used in trading. I can still recall the anguish I felt as a youngster accompanying my late father on a tour of a Ghanaian castle’s dark, damp, dungeon with the single “door of no return” through which, hundreds of years before, slaves were led onto the beach and into ships, never to be able to return. Those dungeons constructed in “castles” that dotted the beautiful coast of West Africa, are a stark reminder of the de-humanizing capability of humans to one-another.
However, there is no annual worldwide commemoration of the havoc wreaked by human depravity and greed of the slave traders and their accomplices, those who supplied and those who bought the slaves, and others who benefited from their unpaid labour. Indeed, every European nation that pontificates using post-World War institutions as if paragons of virtue, should introspect since it was the Europeans who organised, financed and profited from the Atlantic slave trade, and further, both North and South America and the Caribbean were immersed in that despicable, inhumane system as well. To get a seemingly endless supply of slaves, fake and unnecessary wars were created merely to get “captives” who were marched to the coast and thousands were held in filthy, squalid, overcrowded dungeons without even toilets, for months before being shipped out in even worse circumstances in the belly of slave ships to the Caribbean, North and South America for unpaid work till their deaths in sugarcane and cotton fields. From available records, over a period of 400 years, we know that nearly 13 million slaves were shipped from Africa to the Americas. Over 2 million died of diseases on the way when transported in horrendous conditions, or soon after arrival in “seasoning camps”. Millions also died as a result of slave raids, wars and during transport to the coast for sale to European slave traders. In their own ways, enlightened Americans have tried to atone for that painful past. A classmate from a prominent Atlanta family took time off that none of us had, to tutor a black kid from Harlem every week, while in a rigorous time-intensive and therefore sleep-deprived post-graduate degree program.
Kamala Harris is still establishing herself as a major political figure in the capital, and therefore needs a theme for her time in Washington DC and for her legacy thereafter. The last time Kamala Harris visited India was in 2009 to immerse the ashes of her beloved mother Shyamala in the waters touching Chennai, as a dutiful daughter. She has been tasked with dealing with the crisis of migrants fleeing economic hardship and attempting to cross over to the US in unguarded border points. But those migrants are unaware of the hardships that await them, far greater than what they experienced in their home countries, as they face a multitude of exploitations by “coyotes” and other elements who prey on the vulnerabilities of undocumented migrants with limited education. That is why Kamala Harris has been speaking out about dealing with the root causes of desperate migration.
$83 BILLION REMITTANCES MOSTLY SQUANDERED YEARLY IN INDIA ALONE
Remittances by migrants through formal and informal channels total about $600 billion annually, of which about $500 billion (half a trillion dollars) is flowing to developing countries (this far exceeds all official development assistance). The top country recipient of migrant workers’ remittances, India, receives $83 billion in the bank accounts and other informal accounts of relatives and friends of the diaspora. While part of it is essential for subsistence for the poorest, regrettably, most of it is squandered in consumer goods of temporary value, with very little dedicated to investment, and indeed virtually nothing invested in dedicated long-term investment funds (that ought to be matched, for instance, by the increasing number of billionaires) to generate return on investment that can save the members of the diaspora and their relatives, when ill health or age catches up with each migrant. I myself have seen paraplegics who had been painters in the Gulf countries who fell off high-rise buildings and wondered what now happens to them since all their precious remittances would already have been spent by relatives with nothing of residual income left.
And yes, there can be criticism from various quarters on whatever the diaspora/migrants do, and vice versa. One person of Indian origin who was a contemporary of Shyamala Gopalan and V.J. Chacko who undoubtedly inspired them both was Dalip Singh Saund, the first Asian-American US Representative. Saund went to the US during the freedom movement to avoid arrest, did a PhD in mathematics from Berkeley, then could not find a job because of the institutionalized racism of that era and became a successful farmer and rancher in Southern California. Saund’s Czech-born wife even lost her US citizenship merely by marrying an Asian—such was the racism then against Asians. It is why Saund took up that cause and fought to ensure the passage of the Luce-Celler Act of 1946 that first enabled Indians to become US citizens if they chose to. However, Saund’s name is neither well-known nor is it properly commemorated by the Indian diaspora.
A man of deep convictions, Saund believed that lending solely to central governments is a recipe for corruption, a point relevant to the US government and multilateral agencies like the World Bank and IMF. That period coincided with the then-new Kennedy Administration. Elected to the US House of Representatives from Southern California in 1956, Saund rapidly became a favourite of both House Speaker Sam Rayburn and Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, later to become, among tensions, the Vice President in the Kennedy-Johnson Administration. Saund led a delegation of US Representatives on a tour of Asian countries: India, Indonesia, Vietnam and Taiwan. An Indian Ambassador, among the earliest foreign service officers hand-picked by Nehru as India’s shaper of its Ministry of External Affairs, a fellow Sikh as Saund was (albeit both were clean-shaven), and who was our family friend, characterized Saund’s activities as “seeking publicity”, indicating the tensions between the diaspora and India’s elite.
In Saund’s third US Congressional term, President Kennedy introduced the Foreign Assistance Act 1961 that even today forms the basis of US worldwide assistance, because each appropriation is prefaced by referring to that Act. It was the height of Cold War 1.0 and also when the kinetic conflict in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos was picking up steam, and dozens of countries in Africa and Latin America were becoming independent after decolonization struggles. Kennedy therefore wanted a massive lending program to countries of the “Third World” to keep them on the US side. Saund, however, with his rural Punjab background, was convinced that such massive lending by the US government and through multilaterals like the World Bank and IMF directly to central governments would engender corrupt practices, which indeed it has subsequently been proven in multiple countries. Saund, a Member of the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, introduced the “Saund Amendment” that required at least 50% of foreign aid to agrarian nations to be dedicated to the local level. However, that Amendment that passed in the US House of Representatives infuriated President Kennedy and senior members of his Administration. An invitation to Saund to travel with President Kennedy on Air Force One to Berkeley in the spring of 1962 was rescinded, and it was reported by Newsweek that Kennedy snubbed Saund on a visit to an area in Saund’s congressional district. I knew Saund’s son-in-law, scientist Fred Fisher, who had campaigned for Saund’s elections, and over lunch asked him about the incident. Dr Fisher confirmed that it did take place, indicating that someone other than the Kennedy brothers might have done the “kicking off Air Force One” act. It is typical for the unwieldy structure where no one really knows who precisely is doing what. Later, amidst the usual manoeuvring in the Senate-House conference to unify such bills, the “Saund Amendment” was eliminated. My colleague at the Harvard University Commission on Health Research, economist David Bell, previously Kennedy’s Budget Director, told me that he had not heard of such an incident. Indeed, Bell was considered one of the “Kennedy boys”. When Bell protested that he could not take up such a huge responsibility as Budget Director of the US since Bell did not have experience managing a large organization, President Kennedy disarmed Bell with his quick-witted quip: “Neither do I”.
Soon after all that confrontation with the White House, Saund who had suffered minor strokes since 1960, had a terribly bad stroke in 1962 which resulted in his loss of speech, thereby ending his career. Saund passed away in 1973. Interestingly, also in 1973, then-Harvard Professor and current Member of Parliament, Dr Subramanian Swamy, another individual who speaks his mind irrespective of what others might want him to say, wrote in the New York Times that government-to-government loans neither promotes economic growth nor political relations, rather he opined that it worsens both. Dr Swamy went on to explain that in his view foreign aid is favoured by the top bureaucracy in both the US and India, sustaining the high conspicuous consumption of the elites, and consequently the investment pattern based in aid availability is distorted to bolster such consumption, including postponing hard decisions on essential reforms such as tax restructuring and land reforms. Thus, Saund’s vision keeps alive through the work of others. Now, much of that debate is moot amidst aid fatigue and the rise of the private sector worldwide. Indeed, on China’s rise, in addition to generous financial and technology contributions from the US, Japan and Taiwan (ironically countries now the targets of PRC), the overseas Chinese community played a decisive financing role. The similarly successful Indian diaspora has not been fully engaged with India, in terms of investment, believing that the hasty assurances of bureaucrats and some in the political class could not possibly be rooted in the harsh reality.
Here lies an opportunity for Kamala Harris to be an economic/investment bridge between the diaspora and investment needs in India—all people to people. Government schemes will attract their own lending and other programs, bilaterally. But such “glue or connector” that can as well enable reforms on the ground to facilitate investment to India’s teeming millions, will set the standard for her similar endeavours in Latin America that she has already been signalling.
Irrespective of religion, Indians believe that Karma plays a vital role, and the Karma bestowed on Kamala by her beloved mother Syamala’s path-breaking efforts are unquestionably stupendous. Readers can search on the web for photos of Shyamala and her time at Berkeley. Shyamala’s biography ought to be written, first because of all the Karma she bestowed, and second, because she was a pioneering woman in multiple ways. Her time at Berkeley, especially the heady 1958-60 period coincided with my late father’s time in Berkeley, and would be fascinating to learn more about from contemporaries still alive. It is potential homework for Shyamala’s granddaughter Meena or daughter Maya, both accomplished lawyers.
Dr Sunil Chacko holds degrees in medicine (Kerala), public health (Harvard) and an MBA (Columbia). He was Assistant Director of Harvard University’s Intl. Commission on Health Research, served in the Executive Office of the World Bank Group, and has been a faculty member in the US, Canada, Japan and India.