A Passage to Sasural: Usha Vance’s Popularity and Celebrity Status in India Astonish the Vice President

Second Lady Usha Bala Chilukuri Vance has been to India several times before, visiting her extended family in Andhra Pradesh. Yet, she has described her latest visit to the country as “a trip of a lifetime,” telling a local television station that she had always wanted to share her parents’ homeland with her “nuclear” family. 

Vice President JD Vance’s trip was both official and personal. But it was Usha who captured the attention and curiosity of the Indian people. Newspapers carried stories of her Indian heritage, her parents, and her extended family, as well as her romance with Vance after they met at Yale. There were articles on how she is navigating her Hindu faith with her husband’s Catholicism. There were also photos of her wedding with Vance, as the current second lady, and with her kids. 

The attention Usha garnered wasn’t missed by her husband, who “seemed awestruck” by Usha’s popularity in India, as the UK’s Independent pointed out, citing Vance’s speech about India-U.S. business relations. “My wife Usha is a bit of a celebrity in India, much more so than me,” the report quoted him as saying. 

The daughter of Indian immigrants, Usha grew up in a San Diego suburb. Her parents, Chilukuri Radhakrishna (Krish) and Lakshmi Chilukuri, are originally from Andhra Pradesh and moved to the U.S. in 1980. An attorney, Usha worked as an associate at Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP, a job she quit the day after Trump chose Vance as his running mate. 

Usha met Vance at Yale while they were both law students at Yale. In a 2017 interview with NBC News, she said she was attracted to Vance in part because of his positive attitude. “He felt very different.” They married in 2014. The couple has three children — two boys and a girl — Ewan, 7, Vivek, 4, and Mirabel, 2.

While her parents are in the U.S., her extended family lives in India. Her great aunt, Shanthamma Chilukuri, a 96-year-old physicist, comes from a distinguished family filled with doctors, engineers, scientists, and academics. She lives modestly with relatives and helpers in Visakhapatnam, a port city in Andhra Pradesh. She told the Press Trust of India that she was “proud” of the second lady. “She belongs to my family, and I feel very happy that she has risen to that height. I am also very proud,” she told the news agency.

Many who know Usha well believed that she will be a different second lady. While the role of the second lady is relegated to the sidelines of White House life, Usha has played anything but a subordinate role in the rapid rise of her husband. More qualified and professionally accomplished than her husband, it has been speculated that Usha will step up her role as second lady. 

Vance has often praised Usha in interviews, describing her as a “powerful female voice” and saying that she holds considerable influence over his career. “Usha definitely brings me back to Earth a little bit, and if I maybe get a little bit too cocky or a little too proud, I just remind myself that she is way more accomplished than I am,” Vance said in an interview on the “Megyn Kelly Show” podcast in 2020.  “I’m one of those guys who really benefit from having, like, a sort of powerful female voice on his left shoulder saying, ‘Don’t do that, do that’—it just is important. He told Kelly that he loves his wife very much. “Obviously, she’s not a white person, and we’ve been accused — attacked — by some white supremacists over that,” he continued. “But I just — I love Usha. She’s such a good mom, she’s such a brilliant lawyer and I’m so proud of her.”Her experience has “helped give him the perspective that it’s very hard for working families in America,” he added. 

Classmates remember her as someone who stood out in the hyper-competitive world of Ivy League law for her willingness to lend a helping hand. Charles Tyler, now a law professor, told the BBC that Usha “would take time to advise other students on how to apply for the highly prized judicial clerkships that she herself wanted.” She had “a great deal of influence over her husband,” although they “have a very equal partnership,” Tyler said. Another friend called her “a sounding board” for JD Vance, and his “spirit guide pretty much since Yale “Tiger Mom” author and Vance’s mentor at Yale, Amy Chua, told NBC News that Vance once told her that he knew Usha was his soulmate the moment they first met. “He describes it as a lightning bolt, and I saw that. I’ve never seen anybody so starstruck. It was love at first sight,” she shared.

In a November 2020 profile on the Vances, The Cinemaholic noted that in “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance wrote that “Usha helped him realize that he had baggage from his tumultuous upbringing even after he managed to achieve all his dreams.” She had told him that he had no idea of how to resolve a conflict, he wrote. He feared becoming like his mother, he wrote, but Usha made him see that all he had to do was talk to her to make her see his side of an argument. 

Usha was raised as a Hindu and continues to practice the faith. “I did grow up in a religious household, my parents are Hindu, and I think that was one of the things that made them such good parents, that makes them really very good people,” she told Fox News in a previous interview. Vance added during the same interview that his “wife’s faith was a key factor in his decision to re-engage with Christianity later in his life,” which he said Usha has been supportive of. 

But the vice president has been facing online vitriol for Usha’s religion. Just last week, after he wrote a post on X expressing gratitude for being able to spend Good Friday in Rome, he was quickly called a fake Christian for marrying a Hindu. During her first interview as second lady, Usha publicly condemned online racism and the normalization of anti-Indian sentiment. Speaking to The Free Press, she called it “terrible” and reflected on the challenges of public life, calling it anything but normal. ”To me, the highest priority right now is to be actually a normal person,” she said.  It’s a very strange life that we lead, where there are lots of people who have just imagined all sorts of narratives about us and what we think and what we do and why we do it and how much planning goes into it and all,” she added on the constant media attention.

Usha has been celebrated in some Indian American circles, and her rise is often been described as proof of increasing Hindu or Indian visibility in U.S. politics. She has been vocal about her Hindu upbringing and has often addressed it, including the backlash she and her husband have received. But she hasn’t been outspoken about their connection to the country. This trip was no exception.