![]() | This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
![]() | This article has been viewed enough times in a single week to appear in the
Top 25 Report 3 times. The weeks in which this happened:
|
![]() |
Daily pageviews of this article
A graph should have been displayed here but
graphs are temporarily disabled. Until they are enabled again, visit the interactive graph at
pageviews.wmcloud.org |
In the library entry at UCB and for the publication with her mentor her name is listed as Gopalan Shyamala. Libraries can err too, however. -- WiseWoman ( talk) 22:51, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
Here are some other articles in which she is listed as G. Shyamala:
The sum total of this evidence, makes me suspect two things:
Indo-American, really??? Nobody uses that term. Indo-american redirects to Indian American but is nowhere mentioned at that article. Indian American would be possible, but South Asian American is more commonly used - and is how her daughter Kamala Harris describes herself. If no one objects I am going to change this to South Asian American of Tamil descent. -- MelanieN ( talk) 23:23, 14 August 2020 (UTC)
I believe the sentence For her last decade of research, Shyamala worked in the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
is based on a misreading from the subject's obituary. In
her San Francisco Chronicle obituary, it says, "Shyamala spent her early career conducting research at Berkeley's Dept of Zoology and Cancer Research Lab. She returned to the U.C. campus for the last decade of her work at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab." which I believe is referring to where she worked for her last decade with Lawrence Berkeley Lab, and not her last decade of research in her career. She subsequently moved to Montreal and had a 16-year tenure in a research and teaching position at the Jewish General Hospital. With her daughter Kamala graduating in 1981 after five years
[1], she would have arrived in approximately 1976, and so was in Montreal at least until 1992. Can anyone find any citations regarding the timeline of the subject's career subsequent to her move to Montreal?
isaacl (
talk) 16:39, 29 August 2020 (UTC)
the 25 October 2019 piece from LA Times by Mason and Bengali is cited TEN distinct times by my counting...
While I realize this is probably done because each reference is citing different portions of the piece, I'm wondering if perhaps there is some way we could consolidate this where we only list the piece once, but still have different reference tags for different quoted portions? WP:ILCLUTTER and all that.
I guess the problem with WP:CITESHORT is it's intended for page numbers which online articles tend to lack. But I think perhaps we could still list it by paragraph. I'll give that a shot. 64.228.90.251 ( talk) 01:59, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
shyamala_harris@lbl.gov was listed as her e-mail from 2004 to 2019
Melanie Maykin wrote in 2015
Elizabeth Vargis wrote in 2019
This collectively seems to indicate she used the Harris surname long past divorcing Donald in 1971, possibly for the benefit of identifying with her daughters? This makes me wonder if she ever actually changed her name after the divorce at all. If she didn't then Shyamala Harris might always have been her legal name (no change after divorce) with G. Shyamala being a pen name she used for her scientific papers?
The February 2004 archive is a month after Kamala became 27th District Attorney of San Fran (~7yrs before Attorney General of Cali, 13 yrs before Senator) does anyone know if there are any pre-2004 archives showing continued use of the Harris surname? WakandaQT ( talk) 16:04, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
An editor Jqat ( talk · contribs) with less than 10 edits on Wikipedia (though the first two in 2018) has been edit warring about two issues: a) the mention of "brahmin" in Shymala's early history and b) the mention of "Afro-American Association" (AAA) as the name of the study group in which Shyamala and Donald J. Harris first met. The "brahmin" descriptor for the family is widely used now, so I won't address it here, but here is the evidence for AAA: The New York Times article by Ellen Barry, which I had cited says,
"At an off-campus space at the University of California at Berkeley in the fall of 1962, a tall, thin Jamaican Ph.D. student addressed a small crowd, drawing parallels between his native country and the United States. .. Members of the study group that drew them together in 1962, known as the Afro American Association, would help build the discipline of Black studies, introduce the holiday of Kwanzaa and establish the Black Panther Party."
Later, when talking about Shyamala's arrival in Berkeley in the fall of 1959, the article also says,
Shyamala Gopalan fell into important friendships at Berkeley right away. As she stood in line to register for classes, in the fall of 1959, the person standing behind her was Cedric Robinson, a Black teenager from Oakland. ... They would both become part of a Black intellectual study group that met in the off-campus house of Mary Agnes Lewis, an anthropology student. The group, later known as the Afro American Association, was “the most foundational institution in the Black Power movement,” said Ms. Murch, who devotes two chapters to it in her book."
My interpretation of this was that Shymala began to attend the study group's meetings before it had the formal name, but by the time of DJH's talk in the fall of 1962, it did have a name, i.e. AAA. There is some independent evidence for this in:
So, when Donald J. Harris gave his talk in the fall of 1962, immediately after which he met Gopalan Shyamala, the reading group already had a name, @ Jqat:. It was: the Afro-American Association. Pinging @ MelanieN: Fowler&fowler «Talk» 12:22, 16 September 2020 (UTC)the Afro-American Association (AAA) ... emerged out of a reading group founded by several graduate and professional schoo] students at the University of California at Berkeley in 1961. ... By the beginning of 1962 the reading group had begun to meet at Downs Memorial Methodist Church and sponsored Monday night lectures that brought up to 200 people each week. The meetings attracted many from the Oakland area who were growing disenchanted with the largely slapdash local black organizations. Local young people like Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, Ernest Allen, Willie Brown, and Ron Dellums attended lectures and readings hosted by the Afro-American Association, as it was called by March 1962."
I included a reference to an interview Wanda Kagan provided to the CBC, on 2020-11-07. She described living in Shyamala's home, for the remainder of her senior year, when Kamala told Shyamala that Kagan's step-father was molesting her. Shyamala insisted. Shyamala helped her "navigate the system", which I think meant connecting her with social services. Kagan was still very grateful, 40 years later...
Anyhow, she mentioned that Shyamala was less than five feet tall. I don't know under what circumstances that might merit mention in the article, but it is documentable. Geo Swan ( talk) 05:00, 8 November 2020 (UTC)
This page is about Shyamala Gopalan, KH's mother. It should not be used to open all the trapdoors to her bottomless past, and thereby exaggerate the notability of those encountered.
KH's grandfather PV Gopalan did not go to college. He started life as a stenographer, became an assistant in the Central Secretariat Service (formerly the Imperial Secretariat Service), consisting of support staff in India's bureaucracy. He rose through the ranks to become a middle-level Indian bureaucrat. (He was most certainly not in the Indian Civil Service, the steel frame of the Empire, nor its post-colonial successor, the Indian Administrative Service. As the LA Times article clearly says, he never participated in India's independent movement; he couldn't, as it quotes his relatives, he would have lost his job in a heartbeat.)
In the last few years of his service, he was given an appointment in newly post-colonial Zambia, after which he lived out his golden years in Madras, in a middle-class Brahmin neighborhood, going for morning strolls with other retirees and every few years giving expansive talks on the Madras beach about India's independent movement and post-colonial prospects to his impressionable American granddaughter who was visiting.
There are hundreds (more likely thousands) of bureaucrats like that in India, living or having lived unremarkable lives, whose grandchildren later appeared on the American shores also living unremarkable lives, non-notable for Wikipedia's purposes. Kamala Harris's is a uniquely American story. She has created a glowing backdrop to that story. We cannot employ that backdrop to give independent notability to her relatives. I won't edit war with the IP, but please note, PV Gopalan was for the most part a low- to middle-level Indian bureaucrat, quite unremarkable for WP without KH. Fowler&fowler «Talk» 13:15, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
(Sorry I meant sock puppeteer above.) IP, Why do you need to cite to me educational prerequisites for a bureaucratic appointment? If PVG completed a BA at a college, please tell me which year, which college, and which university. You are not suggesting that with all the attention being paid to KH in India these days, no college has claimed PVG for their own? Hard to believe.
Johnbod: I know you said, "broadly construed," but here is what I found out for my own edification. PV Gopalan was in the Central Secretariat Service; see page 257, right-hand column, which is not the Indian Civil Service (ICS).
The bureaucratic hierarchy in an Indian ministry (cabinet department) seems to be: 1. Secretary, or Special Secretary, 2. Additional Secretary, 3. Joint Secretary (JS) 4. Deputy Secretary, 5. Under Secretary, ... Those in the ICS (drafted before 1947) in the early post-colonial cadres of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) are in a different kettle of notability. (See below)
PVG became a Joint Secretary sometime after 1963, for in that year, as a Deputy Secretary, he had written this notice (p 291, right-hand column) in the Gazette of India for Dharam Vira, an ICS man and the Secretary in his department. By 1966, after having become a Joint Secretary, he left India's government service to take up an appointment by deputation in newly independent Zambia (see here in the Gazette of India, 1966, left-hand column, p 154.)
How many JS's were there in the mid-1960s when PVG became one? Well, according to Joint_secretary_to_the_Government_of_India#History, in 1946, just before India's independence, there were 25 Joint Secretaries. According to Joint_secretary_to_the_Government_of_India#Reforms_and_challenges, in 2015, or thereabouts, there were 341 Joint Secretaries. (In the mid-1960s, there were 15 government ministries in India (according to the this report in the New York Times.) Summing all this information, it is reasonable to infer that in the mid-1960s there were between 30 and 45 Joint Secretaries, and probably more. We are talking about a big, big, bureaucracy, in which there have been hundreds of JS's since 1947.
As for the Secretaries (the topmost bureaucratic position holders in a cabinet department in India's government), I'm listing some ICS men from the mid-1960s: Dharam Vira, already mentioned above, (who is described as a politician), Y. D. Gundevia, Vishnu Sahay, Jagdish Chandra Mathur (who had a second career as a Hindi writer), or Nirmal Kumar Mukarji. There seem to be other ICS (or pre-1947 IAS) men such as P. C. Matthew or Raja Roy-Singh (see also here) for whom we don't have WP pages (not that it is PV Gopalan's fault). PVG does not have their level of professional notability
I think we should at least mention in PVG's lead—and probably in the lead sentence—that he is Kamala Harris's grandfather. Without her, what we have is a slow unremarkable rise (for India's upper-class, though not for India's population) from this position in 1950 to this position in 1966
Anyway, I've already spent more time than I wanted to. My heart is really not in this. Fowler&fowler «Talk» 22:39, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
The template lists the date of divorce to Donald as 1971 but there is no source listed.
The 'personal life' section only says "early 70s" so I'm wondering about making it more specific.
"After Shyamala divorced Donald in the early 1970s" is from https://archive.md/https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2019-10-25/how-kamala-harris-indian-family-shaped-her-political-career
https://www.latimes.com/local/politics/la-me-pol-ca-harris-senate-20150930-story.html says "They divorced when Harris was 5" though... Kamala was born in 1964 so that makes it sound like the divorce was in 1969.
So which is it... 1969, 1970, 1971? If we could get the particular month I think that would help clarify things. WakandaQT ( talk) 20:22, 17 December 2021 (UTC)
@ Fowler&fowler: why in special:diff/1060817161 did you insert the claim that Shyamala is American when we only have an article source supporting her being granted permanent residency in April 1968?
https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/foia/Shyamala_Gopalan_Harris.pdf (pg 3)
Unless you can supply a source asserting she is an American citizen, there is no precedent for describing her as being an American citizen.
Please remove your unsourced additions to this page, unless they are accompanied by reliable sources backing them up.
It is WP:OR to claim Shyamala is an American citizen without supplying a source for it. WakandaQT ( talk) 21:28, 17 December 2021 (UTC)
Your asserting that Shyamala's nationality is not notable doesn't explain why you keep calling her American w/o sourcing it. Please stop inserting unsourced speculation. The only things we have sourced are that she had Indian citizenship (no indication she renounced it so why do you keep removing that?) and that she got her green card in April 1968.
Yeah in all likelyhood she probably became a citizen sometime in the 70s or 80s but you still need to actually find a source to support the information. WakandaQT ( talk) 22:30, 23 December 2021 (UTC)
![]() | This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
![]() | This article has been viewed enough times in a single week to appear in the
Top 25 Report 3 times. The weeks in which this happened:
|
![]() |
Daily pageviews of this article
A graph should have been displayed here but
graphs are temporarily disabled. Until they are enabled again, visit the interactive graph at
pageviews.wmcloud.org |
In the library entry at UCB and for the publication with her mentor her name is listed as Gopalan Shyamala. Libraries can err too, however. -- WiseWoman ( talk) 22:51, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
Here are some other articles in which she is listed as G. Shyamala:
The sum total of this evidence, makes me suspect two things:
Indo-American, really??? Nobody uses that term. Indo-american redirects to Indian American but is nowhere mentioned at that article. Indian American would be possible, but South Asian American is more commonly used - and is how her daughter Kamala Harris describes herself. If no one objects I am going to change this to South Asian American of Tamil descent. -- MelanieN ( talk) 23:23, 14 August 2020 (UTC)
I believe the sentence For her last decade of research, Shyamala worked in the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
is based on a misreading from the subject's obituary. In
her San Francisco Chronicle obituary, it says, "Shyamala spent her early career conducting research at Berkeley's Dept of Zoology and Cancer Research Lab. She returned to the U.C. campus for the last decade of her work at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab." which I believe is referring to where she worked for her last decade with Lawrence Berkeley Lab, and not her last decade of research in her career. She subsequently moved to Montreal and had a 16-year tenure in a research and teaching position at the Jewish General Hospital. With her daughter Kamala graduating in 1981 after five years
[1], she would have arrived in approximately 1976, and so was in Montreal at least until 1992. Can anyone find any citations regarding the timeline of the subject's career subsequent to her move to Montreal?
isaacl (
talk) 16:39, 29 August 2020 (UTC)
the 25 October 2019 piece from LA Times by Mason and Bengali is cited TEN distinct times by my counting...
While I realize this is probably done because each reference is citing different portions of the piece, I'm wondering if perhaps there is some way we could consolidate this where we only list the piece once, but still have different reference tags for different quoted portions? WP:ILCLUTTER and all that.
I guess the problem with WP:CITESHORT is it's intended for page numbers which online articles tend to lack. But I think perhaps we could still list it by paragraph. I'll give that a shot. 64.228.90.251 ( talk) 01:59, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
shyamala_harris@lbl.gov was listed as her e-mail from 2004 to 2019
Melanie Maykin wrote in 2015
Elizabeth Vargis wrote in 2019
This collectively seems to indicate she used the Harris surname long past divorcing Donald in 1971, possibly for the benefit of identifying with her daughters? This makes me wonder if she ever actually changed her name after the divorce at all. If she didn't then Shyamala Harris might always have been her legal name (no change after divorce) with G. Shyamala being a pen name she used for her scientific papers?
The February 2004 archive is a month after Kamala became 27th District Attorney of San Fran (~7yrs before Attorney General of Cali, 13 yrs before Senator) does anyone know if there are any pre-2004 archives showing continued use of the Harris surname? WakandaQT ( talk) 16:04, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
An editor Jqat ( talk · contribs) with less than 10 edits on Wikipedia (though the first two in 2018) has been edit warring about two issues: a) the mention of "brahmin" in Shymala's early history and b) the mention of "Afro-American Association" (AAA) as the name of the study group in which Shyamala and Donald J. Harris first met. The "brahmin" descriptor for the family is widely used now, so I won't address it here, but here is the evidence for AAA: The New York Times article by Ellen Barry, which I had cited says,
"At an off-campus space at the University of California at Berkeley in the fall of 1962, a tall, thin Jamaican Ph.D. student addressed a small crowd, drawing parallels between his native country and the United States. .. Members of the study group that drew them together in 1962, known as the Afro American Association, would help build the discipline of Black studies, introduce the holiday of Kwanzaa and establish the Black Panther Party."
Later, when talking about Shyamala's arrival in Berkeley in the fall of 1959, the article also says,
Shyamala Gopalan fell into important friendships at Berkeley right away. As she stood in line to register for classes, in the fall of 1959, the person standing behind her was Cedric Robinson, a Black teenager from Oakland. ... They would both become part of a Black intellectual study group that met in the off-campus house of Mary Agnes Lewis, an anthropology student. The group, later known as the Afro American Association, was “the most foundational institution in the Black Power movement,” said Ms. Murch, who devotes two chapters to it in her book."
My interpretation of this was that Shymala began to attend the study group's meetings before it had the formal name, but by the time of DJH's talk in the fall of 1962, it did have a name, i.e. AAA. There is some independent evidence for this in:
So, when Donald J. Harris gave his talk in the fall of 1962, immediately after which he met Gopalan Shyamala, the reading group already had a name, @ Jqat:. It was: the Afro-American Association. Pinging @ MelanieN: Fowler&fowler «Talk» 12:22, 16 September 2020 (UTC)the Afro-American Association (AAA) ... emerged out of a reading group founded by several graduate and professional schoo] students at the University of California at Berkeley in 1961. ... By the beginning of 1962 the reading group had begun to meet at Downs Memorial Methodist Church and sponsored Monday night lectures that brought up to 200 people each week. The meetings attracted many from the Oakland area who were growing disenchanted with the largely slapdash local black organizations. Local young people like Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, Ernest Allen, Willie Brown, and Ron Dellums attended lectures and readings hosted by the Afro-American Association, as it was called by March 1962."
I included a reference to an interview Wanda Kagan provided to the CBC, on 2020-11-07. She described living in Shyamala's home, for the remainder of her senior year, when Kamala told Shyamala that Kagan's step-father was molesting her. Shyamala insisted. Shyamala helped her "navigate the system", which I think meant connecting her with social services. Kagan was still very grateful, 40 years later...
Anyhow, she mentioned that Shyamala was less than five feet tall. I don't know under what circumstances that might merit mention in the article, but it is documentable. Geo Swan ( talk) 05:00, 8 November 2020 (UTC)
This page is about Shyamala Gopalan, KH's mother. It should not be used to open all the trapdoors to her bottomless past, and thereby exaggerate the notability of those encountered.
KH's grandfather PV Gopalan did not go to college. He started life as a stenographer, became an assistant in the Central Secretariat Service (formerly the Imperial Secretariat Service), consisting of support staff in India's bureaucracy. He rose through the ranks to become a middle-level Indian bureaucrat. (He was most certainly not in the Indian Civil Service, the steel frame of the Empire, nor its post-colonial successor, the Indian Administrative Service. As the LA Times article clearly says, he never participated in India's independent movement; he couldn't, as it quotes his relatives, he would have lost his job in a heartbeat.)
In the last few years of his service, he was given an appointment in newly post-colonial Zambia, after which he lived out his golden years in Madras, in a middle-class Brahmin neighborhood, going for morning strolls with other retirees and every few years giving expansive talks on the Madras beach about India's independent movement and post-colonial prospects to his impressionable American granddaughter who was visiting.
There are hundreds (more likely thousands) of bureaucrats like that in India, living or having lived unremarkable lives, whose grandchildren later appeared on the American shores also living unremarkable lives, non-notable for Wikipedia's purposes. Kamala Harris's is a uniquely American story. She has created a glowing backdrop to that story. We cannot employ that backdrop to give independent notability to her relatives. I won't edit war with the IP, but please note, PV Gopalan was for the most part a low- to middle-level Indian bureaucrat, quite unremarkable for WP without KH. Fowler&fowler «Talk» 13:15, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
(Sorry I meant sock puppeteer above.) IP, Why do you need to cite to me educational prerequisites for a bureaucratic appointment? If PVG completed a BA at a college, please tell me which year, which college, and which university. You are not suggesting that with all the attention being paid to KH in India these days, no college has claimed PVG for their own? Hard to believe.
Johnbod: I know you said, "broadly construed," but here is what I found out for my own edification. PV Gopalan was in the Central Secretariat Service; see page 257, right-hand column, which is not the Indian Civil Service (ICS).
The bureaucratic hierarchy in an Indian ministry (cabinet department) seems to be: 1. Secretary, or Special Secretary, 2. Additional Secretary, 3. Joint Secretary (JS) 4. Deputy Secretary, 5. Under Secretary, ... Those in the ICS (drafted before 1947) in the early post-colonial cadres of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) are in a different kettle of notability. (See below)
PVG became a Joint Secretary sometime after 1963, for in that year, as a Deputy Secretary, he had written this notice (p 291, right-hand column) in the Gazette of India for Dharam Vira, an ICS man and the Secretary in his department. By 1966, after having become a Joint Secretary, he left India's government service to take up an appointment by deputation in newly independent Zambia (see here in the Gazette of India, 1966, left-hand column, p 154.)
How many JS's were there in the mid-1960s when PVG became one? Well, according to Joint_secretary_to_the_Government_of_India#History, in 1946, just before India's independence, there were 25 Joint Secretaries. According to Joint_secretary_to_the_Government_of_India#Reforms_and_challenges, in 2015, or thereabouts, there were 341 Joint Secretaries. (In the mid-1960s, there were 15 government ministries in India (according to the this report in the New York Times.) Summing all this information, it is reasonable to infer that in the mid-1960s there were between 30 and 45 Joint Secretaries, and probably more. We are talking about a big, big, bureaucracy, in which there have been hundreds of JS's since 1947.
As for the Secretaries (the topmost bureaucratic position holders in a cabinet department in India's government), I'm listing some ICS men from the mid-1960s: Dharam Vira, already mentioned above, (who is described as a politician), Y. D. Gundevia, Vishnu Sahay, Jagdish Chandra Mathur (who had a second career as a Hindi writer), or Nirmal Kumar Mukarji. There seem to be other ICS (or pre-1947 IAS) men such as P. C. Matthew or Raja Roy-Singh (see also here) for whom we don't have WP pages (not that it is PV Gopalan's fault). PVG does not have their level of professional notability
I think we should at least mention in PVG's lead—and probably in the lead sentence—that he is Kamala Harris's grandfather. Without her, what we have is a slow unremarkable rise (for India's upper-class, though not for India's population) from this position in 1950 to this position in 1966
Anyway, I've already spent more time than I wanted to. My heart is really not in this. Fowler&fowler «Talk» 22:39, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
The template lists the date of divorce to Donald as 1971 but there is no source listed.
The 'personal life' section only says "early 70s" so I'm wondering about making it more specific.
"After Shyamala divorced Donald in the early 1970s" is from https://archive.md/https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2019-10-25/how-kamala-harris-indian-family-shaped-her-political-career
https://www.latimes.com/local/politics/la-me-pol-ca-harris-senate-20150930-story.html says "They divorced when Harris was 5" though... Kamala was born in 1964 so that makes it sound like the divorce was in 1969.
So which is it... 1969, 1970, 1971? If we could get the particular month I think that would help clarify things. WakandaQT ( talk) 20:22, 17 December 2021 (UTC)
@ Fowler&fowler: why in special:diff/1060817161 did you insert the claim that Shyamala is American when we only have an article source supporting her being granted permanent residency in April 1968?
https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/foia/Shyamala_Gopalan_Harris.pdf (pg 3)
Unless you can supply a source asserting she is an American citizen, there is no precedent for describing her as being an American citizen.
Please remove your unsourced additions to this page, unless they are accompanied by reliable sources backing them up.
It is WP:OR to claim Shyamala is an American citizen without supplying a source for it. WakandaQT ( talk) 21:28, 17 December 2021 (UTC)
Your asserting that Shyamala's nationality is not notable doesn't explain why you keep calling her American w/o sourcing it. Please stop inserting unsourced speculation. The only things we have sourced are that she had Indian citizenship (no indication she renounced it so why do you keep removing that?) and that she got her green card in April 1968.
Yeah in all likelyhood she probably became a citizen sometime in the 70s or 80s but you still need to actually find a source to support the information. WakandaQT ( talk) 22:30, 23 December 2021 (UTC)