CHENNAI, India (Kyodo) -- U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris' Indian aunt Sarala Gopalan believes her niece, the Democratic nominee for the Nov. 5 presidential election, was shaped by her late mother's self-reliance and sense of justice.

Harris, the daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants, would become the first woman to serve as president of the United States if she defeats Republican nominee Donald Trump.

Gopalan, an 80-year-old retired doctor in Tamil Nadu state in southern India, said her older sister Shyamala Gopalan, who arrived in the United States to study medicine in 1958 and became a breast cancer researcher, was a major influence on Harris.

"My sister had definite views...In fact, way back when she went to the United States, nobody would dream that from a South Indian family, a girl of 18 or 19 would go to the USA to study," Gopalan told Kyodo News in her modest apartment in a suburb of the state capital Chennai late last month.

Shyamala, then a science major student in New Delhi, made the decision by herself to study abroad and applied for a scholarship, according to Gopalan.

"My sister got all that without any help," she said. "She encouraged her daughters also to grow up in that way," Gopalan said about Harris and her sister Maya.

Harris, 60, was born to Shyamala and Donald Harris, a Jamaican economist, whom Shyamala met when joining the civil rights movement.

In a speech at the Democratic National Convention in August when she formally accepted the party's nomination following President Joe Biden's withdrawal from the presidential race, Harris noted she had mostly been raised by her mother after her parents divorced when she was in elementary school.

"She taught us to never complain about injustice, but do something about it," Harris said in reference to her mother.

Gopalan said Shyamala never accepted injustice.

"She would tell them (her daughters) they must fight for the right and do the right things and look after people," Gopalan said.

After Shyamala died in 2009 following colon cancer, Harris flew to Chennai to scatter her mother's ashes in the Bay of Bengal, together with Gopalan and other relatives.

Harris respects her family members from India, Gopalan said, noting that she wrote about her Indian family among others in a picture book called "Superheroes Are Everywhere" about those who had influenced her.

"It's a nice concept where she tried to explain we can learn something from everyone around us," she said.

In early October this year, Gopalan contacted Harris.

"During the call, I told her, joking, that I'm losing my identity because everybody calls me Kamala's 'chitti' (meaning aunt in the Tamil language) and they don't know my real name. So she laughed and said 'Nothing to worry about'," she said.

When asked about her expectations for the presidential election, Gopalan only said she believes her niece is doing a great job in achieving a milestone in her life.

"If my health permits, and if she becomes president, I will go (to the inauguration ceremony), but it's not that I will not visit her if she doesn't become president. I will visit her. She's family," Gopalan said.

(By Rini Dutta)