Shyamala Gopalan: The woman who inspired Kamala Harris

Shyamala Gopalan was a pioneering woman of colour in America, a scientist and an activist. She was also Vice-President Kamala Harris's mother and her "greatest influence". Geeta Pandey in Delhi and Vineet Khare in Washington DC look at her life.

Just hours before her inauguration last week, Vice-President Harris paid tribute to the women who had aided her journey to the second highest position in the US government.

In a video posted to Twitter, she began with "the woman most responsible for my presence here today, my mother Shyamala Gopalan Harris".

"When she came here from India at the age of 19, maybe she didn't quite imagine this moment," she said.

"But she believed so deeply in an America where a moment like this is possible."

Ms Harris has made history - she's the first woman and first black and South Asian American to become the US vice-president.

But the story of her rise couldn't be written if it wasn't for an audacious journey her mother made in 1958 when she travelled to the US from India to pursue her own dreams.

The oldest of the four children of a civil servant father and a homemaker mother, Ms Gopalan wanted to study biochemistry.

But hard sciences were not on offer at Delhi's Lady Irwin College for women, founded by India's British colonial rulers, and she had to settle for an undergraduate degree in home science, where she would have studied subjects like nutrition and homemaking skills.

"My father and I would tease her about it," Gopalan Balachandran, her brother, told the BBC.

"We'd ask her, 'What do they teach you there? How to lay the table? Where to place the spoon":[]}