Topline

The results of the US presidential election sparked contrasting reactions in two small villages in southern India, as residents of Vadluru – the ancestral home of Vice President-elect JD Vance’s wife, Usha – celebrated President-elect Donald Trump’s victory, while residents of Kamala Harris The ancestral village of Thulasendrapuram was dismayed by their defeat.

Important facts

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Important background

Usha Chilukuri Vance was born in San Diego, California, to Telugu-speaking parents who immigrated from India in the late 1970s and had roots in Andhra Pradesh. Vance comes from a family of academics; Her grandfather Ramasastry Chilukuri taught physics at the prestigious IIT Madras, and the institute still has a student award named after him. Her father Chilukuri Radhakrishnan is a mechanical engineering graduate from IIT Madras and later worked as a professor at San Diego State University, while her mother Laksmi Chilukuri is a marine molecular biologist and vice-chancellor at the University of California, San Diego. Vance’s great aunt Shanthamma Chilukuri is one of her few close relatives who still lives in Andhra Pradesh. Local media claims that 96-year-old Shanthamma is the oldest active professor in the country. Vance herself is a graduate of Yale Law School.

tangent

Harris’ maternal grandfather, PV Gopalan, was born in Thulasendrapuram in 1911. He later became a civil servant in British-ruled India, which eventually became the Indian Civil Service after the country’s independence. Later in his life, Gopalan served on an Indian diplomatic mission to Zambia to help the country deal with the influx of refugees from Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) as the country fought for its independence. Harris’ mother Shyamala was one of Gopalan’s four children and she immigrated to the United States at the age of 19 to study at UC Berkeley. Harris’ name, along with that of her maternal grandfather, is engraved on a stone tablet inside the village temple since the vice president made a donation to the temple in 2014 for its dedication following renovation.

Further reading

Kamala Harris’ Ancestral Village in India celebrates her presidential run with prayers, sweets and cautious excitement (Forbes)