Boston Brahmins, TamBrams, and Kamala

The Digital Alarmist: Shyamala Gopalan Harris, Kamala’s mother, was not a Boston Brahmin but a ‘real’ Tamil-speaking Brahmin (‘TamBram’), born and raised in Tamil Nadu.

Come November 5, should Kamala Harris be elected the 47th President of the United States, she will have achieved a number of firsts – first female President of the US (POTUS), first African-American female to become POTUS, and the first POTUS of South Asian descent.

The first President who has a Tamil Brahmin, but not a Boston Brahmin, background. There have been 13 US Presidents who were considered Boston Brahmins — the descendants of English colonialists who settled in and around Boston and belonged to the Anglican Church.

Shyamala Gopalan Harris, Kamala’s mother, was not a Boston Brahmin but a ‘real’ Tamil-speaking Brahmin (‘TamBram’), born and raised in Tamil Nadu.

So, what is the difference? Not much. When we examine the social, cultural and religious practices of the two groups and what informs their politics, we find they are quite similar. However, history has not been kind to TamBrams in the last 75 years. Actively courted and eventually co-opted by the British into serving the administrative needs of the Raj, they held on to their positions post-Independence, mostly in Tamil Nadu, until they were marginalised by the majority Dravidians in the state.

Once considered the ruling class of America, Boston Brahmins are mere upstarts who have been around for just 400 years, while the TamBrams have been around for more than a thousand years, long enough to have created a refined, yet highly prejudiced and closely knit socio-religious community in which scholarship was more important than wealth.

The term Boston Brahmins describes the small community of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants who dominated Boston and US society starting in the 17th century and through much of the 20th century in politics, industry, the arts, philanthropy and academia. They founded Harvard University and several prep schools which served as pipelines to Harvard; and they built art museums and parks for the benefit of the ordinary citizens of Boston. Extremely class-conscious, they accumulated a great deal of wealth through railroads, shipping and international trade, intermarried, kept outsiders at arm’s length, and were proud of their British ancestry. If you did not attend Harvard, you were considered a nobody, a sentiment which holds true to some degree even today.

Boston Brahmins were notorious bigots who despised the Irish and Italian immigrants who flooded into Boston toward the end of the 19th century and the early 20th century. Their politicians were solely responsible for passage of the US Immigration Act of 1924, which restricted the number of immigrants from Asia and Africa to no more than 100 per country each year. This quota was finally removed when new immigration legislation was enacted in 1965.

There are roughly two million TamBrams across the globe. They are either Iyengars, who worship Vishnu (‘the preserver’), or the Iyers, who worship Shiva (‘the destroyer’). They rarely marry outside their own narrowly defined communities. Shyama Gopalan was an Iyer -- she destroyed all stereotypes by crossing the ‘black’ oceans (considered taboo in highly orthodox circles) to become a scientist (a rarity), picking her own marriage partner -- a black Christian, no less -- and subsequently divorcing him (there is an injunction against that, too).

TamBrams can be also be quite bigoted when it comes to dealing with other races and religions. Just like the Boston Brahmins, they too live in communities surrounded by virtual gates that they have erected and rarely cross, and a singular obsession with avoiding being polluted by the ‘other’.

Unlike the Boston Brahmins, TamBrams have never been concerned with the public commons. Irrespective of where they live, they ignore the open sewers and littered pavements when they go to work. In contrast, their homes are swept daily by servants (only from the lower castes, mind you).

Prominent Boston Brahmins include Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, a virulent opponent of immigration and architect of the immigration law of 1924, Presidents F D Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge, and the poets T S Eliot and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Notables among the TamBrams are Sir C V Raman, an Iyer and the first non-white to receive a Nobel Prize in the sciences, and three Iyengars -- Rajaji, the first, last and only Indian Governor General; the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, and Sundar Pichai, the current CEO of Google (Alphabet).

Shyamala Gopalan’s real achievement was in crossing the invisible red lines drawn by time-worn social, cultural and religious norms. Her daughter Kamala is a class act, unlike the ill-bred vulgarian from Queens.

If and when a Kamala Harris administration takes over, will its policies reflect Kamala’s TamBram heritage? Only time will tell.