Can’t pronounce ‘Kamala’? Here’s why I won’t judge you
By Raj Mankad, Houston Chronicle Deputy Opinion Editor
August 22, 2024
Vice President Kamala Harris has simple guide for pronouncing her first name. For years she’s told people to say it like the punctuation mark “comma” with a “la” added to the end. This week at the Democratic National Convention, nearly all the speakers singing her praises have said it the way she wants.
Yet, “comma-la” is not a traditional way to say the name in India, and Harris knows it. In a 2017 interview for the podcast The Axe, she shared that her grandmother would say it “kuh-muh-luh,” and then repeated her preferred “Comma-la” pronunciation.
For Indian Americans like me, this deliberate mispronunciation of one’s own name is very familiar. Every time I hear Harris do it, I feel both solidarity and pain. The same for former Louisiana Gov. Piyush Jindal, who goes by “Bobby,” and former South Carolina Gov. Nimarata Haley, who goes by her middle name “Nikki.”
When I hear “Comma-la” or “Bobby” or “Nikki,” I think, we all survived. By that, I don’t mean survival from prejudice, though I’m sure that was part of all our childhoods. I also don’t mean survival from poverty. I never lacked for food, shelter or a loving family. What I did lack is harder to explain. In the ’70s and ’80s, growing up in what was then a tiny minority group was a challenge. Indian American kids didn’t have a place in the cultural landscape. Should we sound white or Black when we talked? Which table should we choose in a self-segregating school cafeteria? Which barber do we go to? Are we supposed to be good at sports or math? We were unmoored. We could end up anywhere. A stereotypical Indian American? Didn’t exist yet.
All that fear and freedom was encapsulated in our names.
My parents chose a name for me that English speakers would find familiar. Raj, as in Rog-er. As for my last name, it includes a retroflex d sound that doesn’t exist in English. Even I struggle with it. My whole life, to my chagrin, I’ve gone around telling people to mispronounce my own last name.
Many Americans go through this. If your family came from somewhere like Poland, China, Nigeria or Egypt, you know what I’m talking about. Donald Trump, the former and potentially future president, knows a little bit about it too. His ancestors in Germany were the Drumpfs.
Even so, Trump takes a cavalier and disrespectful approach to his opponent’s name.
“They were explaining to me, ‘You can’t say kuh-MALA — you can say COMMA-la,” heboasted at a recent rally. “Don’t worry about it — I couldn’t care less if I mispronounce it. I couldn’t care less.’”
If he struggled to say her name, that’d be one thing. Choosing not to say it the way she prefers? That’s dog-whistle politics. Again and again, he tries to portray her as foreign. On Monday, at a Pennsylvania rally, he questioned whether Democrats knew where Harris “came from.”
The irony is that Trump’s mispronunciation is as close to the traditional pronunciation as Harris’ preference is.
I called my parents to ask what they think. Originally from Gujarat, they were raised on the other side of India from Harris’ Tamil-speaking mother. They pronounce the vice president’s name “kum’la,” dropping the middle vowel.
Amused by the variation within India, we asked a Bengali-speaking friend for his version. He said ko-mo-la, with long o’s and about the same stress on all the syllables.
So there’s not one right way to say Kamala. But there is a wrong attitude — Trump’s purposeful disrespect.
As Americans, we should do our best to say one another’s names in the way that the nameholder pefers. We should also be generous with everyday folks who struggle to pronounce sounds they’ve never heard before, and generous with people like me who don’t pronounce their own names “correctly,” and generous with people who speak English with an accent.
My parents were doctors in Alabama, and patients often struggled to say their names. “Hey, doc,” they’d say, which didn’t bother my parents. What did bother them were the people who avoided interacting at all because they were “so embarrassed for not knowing or remembering our names.” My parents found that isolating. Worse still, my parents said, were those who were prejudiced and insisted it was their “right to ignore, mispronounce and not do business with anyone who does not fit their American sense of names.”
In her memoir, “The Truths We Hold,” Harris recalls her own mother’s struggles because of her “heavy accent.” People would “overlook her or not take her seriously.” When I read that, I felt a surge of loyalty to my own mother and my many immigrant friends in Houston.
Kamala means lotus in Sanskrit. It has special significance in India because the lotus flower, a thing of near perfect beauty, emerges from murky water. Names are murky. We have a choice when we utter them. Names can be said with perfect derision — or, if spoken with love and compassion, no matter how bad the pronunciation, they can bloom upon our lips.
Raj Mankad
Deputy Opinion Editor
Raj Mankad is the deputy opinion editor at the Houston Chronicle. He believes in making room at the table for voices from across the political spectrum and all our diversity. He has a PhD from the University of Houston Creative Writing Program, and has edited and written for publications that specialize in economics, philosophy, literature, architecture, science and health. He previously served as the Chronicle’s op-ed editor and won the 2021 Texas APME first place in general column writing.