People across India are celebrating Kamala Harris’s inauguration as the next vice president of the United States on Wednesday, with residents in her ancestral village setting off firecrackers and distributing food.
Thulasendrapuram, a leafy village about 320km (200 miles) south of the coastal city of Chennai in Tamil Nadu state, is where Harris’s maternal grandfather was born more than a century ago.
In Punjab state’s Amritsar city, painter Jagjot Singh Rubal painted a mural depicting US President-elect Joe Biden and Harris.
Another Indian artist and teacher, Sagar Kambli, made paintings of Biden and Harris outside his art school in the financial capital, Mumbai.
Separately, artist Sudarsan Pattnaik created a sand sculpture featuring the two Democrats.
Harris, born to an Indian mother and Jamaican father, both of whom immigrated to the US to study, visited Thulasendrapuram when she was five and has recalled walks with her grandfather on the beach at Chennai.
Harris becomes the first woman, first Black American and first Asian American to win the second-highest US office.
