From temple donations to family visits, how Kamala Harris is still the pride of her Indian ancestral village

Between the coconut trees, bungalows and rice paddies of this remote village in southern India there is a bizarre sight: a collection of giant blue posters adorned with the face of US vice president Kamala Harris, each wishing her – in the local Tamil language – luck for November’s presidential election.

It is more than a century since Harris’s grandfather was born here in Thulasendrapuram, a tiny hamlet some 300km away from the state capital Chennai. Yet remarkably the Democrat and her family still maintain good ties to their ancestral home, a fact that has won her a village full of adoring fans a world away from Washington DC.

Outside the village’s 300-year-old temple dedicated to the Hindu deity Sastha there is a black stone tablet, proclaiming the names of major donors. There, written alongside an amount of Rs 5000 (£46.50), is Kamala Harris – a record of an offering made in her name in 2014, at at time when she was still serving as California’s attorney general.

The Sri Dharma Sastha Temple is abuzz at 6.30am with shops opening ahead of morning prayers. Siva Kumar, the priest in charge of the morning schedule, recalls a relative making the donation to the temple’s consecration on Harris’s behalf.

“Even after her family has moved from the village, they still sponsor prayers at the temple, not giving up on their roots. That is a source of pride for us,” says N Maheshwari, who runs a grocery shop close to the temple.

Harris’s grandfather PV Gopalan was born in Thulasendrapuram in the early 1900s and moved away from the village, first to Chennai and later to Delhi, to become a civil servant in British-ruled India. His success paved the way for Harris’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan, to move to the US when she was 19 to