Mary Roy’s Bold Battle for Equal Inheritance Rights in Kerala
Thiruvananthapuram: When Arundhati Roy’s memoir about her late mother was published this August, readers expected a daughter’s remembrance. What they encountered instead was a reckoning.
The Booker Prize-winning novelist describes Mary Roy in Mother Mary Comes to Me as a woman who gave her children both refuge and anguish, courage and wounds.
It is a portrait unflinching in intimacy. Yet beyond the mother-daughter dynamic, the memoir has reopened a larger conversation in their home state of Kerala: what became of Mary’s most famous battle – the one she fought not in the family home but in the courts of law?
In 1986, Mary stood before the Supreme Court of India and won a victory that shook the foundations of her community. She ensured that Christian women in Kerala, long denied their rightful inheritance, would finally be treated as equals to their brothers. It was a judgment that promised to liberate generations of daughters from dependence and indignity.
Nearly four decades later, however, the reality on the ground is starkly different. In village after village, in family after family, property continues to flow along patriarchal lines. The law changed, but the social script did not.
A woman who refused to bow down
Mary was born in 1933 in Ayemanam, a village on the banks of the Meenachil river in Kottayam district. It was the same landscape that her daughter would later immortalise in The God of Small Things. She belonged to a wealthy Syrian Christian family and seemed destined for a life of comfort. But from the beginning, she was marked by rebellion.
Her first act of defiance came in marriage. She wed Rajib Roy, a Bengali Hindu, against her family’s wishes. What began as a daring step soon collapsed into disappointment. The marriage broke down irretrievably, leaving Mary a single mother of two young children – daughter Arundhati and son Lalit – in a deeply conservative society that treated divorce as scandalous and women alone as suspect.
She returned with her children to her family home in Ooty and later to Kerala, where she encountered not sympathy but hostility. Relatives resented her independence. Society whispered about her choices. Economic survival became a daily struggle. She took up teaching to sustain her family but refused to remarry or retreat into dependence. Those years of hardship shaped the steel that would later define her.
And then she discovered a deeper injustice – one codified in law itself. Under the Travancore Christian Succession Act of 1916, which governed inheritance in her native region, daughters were entitled only to a token sum: once as little as Rs 5, later raised to Rs 5,000. Sons, by contrast, inherited the entire property.
For women like Mary, who had already endured the vulnerabilities of a failed marriage, this was not merely unfair – it was a denial of dignity. “The message was blunt,” recalls Kochi-based social worker Sonia Annice Titus. “A daughter, no matter how accomplished or needy, was treated as an outsider once she married. Her very birthright was reduced to the price of a piece of jewellery.”
The long battle for justice
Mary decided to challenge this. In 1976, she filed a case in the Kerala high court demanding her share of her father’s property. Her petition, Mary Roy v. State of Kerala, was less about wealth than principle. But the community saw it differently.
In Kottayam’s coffee houses and church compounds, she became “that woman”, the one dragging her family into court. Priests thundered about disobedient daughters. Even relatives muttered that she was washing dirty linen in public.
The case dragged on for a decade, winding its way up to the Supreme Court. Mary endured isolation and vitriol, but she did not bend. She went to court not merely for her own inheritance but for the dignity of every Christian daughter silenced by tradition.
In 1986, her persistence paid off. The Supreme Court struck down the Travancore law and declared that Christian women in Kerala would henceforth inherit equally under the Indian Succession Act. It was hailed as revolutionary. Women wrote to Mary thanking her for restoring their pride. Newspapers called her Kerala’s feminist trailblazer.
The paradox of victory
But inside Christian homes, another story unfolded. Fathers quietly divided property among sons. Brothers persuaded sisters to sign away their rights. Families argued that the dowry and gold given at marriage were a daughter’s “share”. Churches continued to sanctify silence.
“Even today, women who insist on their inheritance are branded selfish, their lawsuits treated as acts of betrayal. Property deeds are often executed in sons’ names long before parents pass away. Relinquishment deeds are pushed across dining tables for daughters to sign. The law stands on paper, but culture writes its own script,” observes Jolly Chirayath, a Kochi-based Malayalam author and film personality.
“Mary Roy won the case, but the Christian community of the state learnt to work around it. Kerala’s daughters, raised to believe marriage severed their claims to their natal homes, still hesitate to demand what is legally theirs. Her victory, monumental as it was, remains unfinished,” adds Chirayath.
The lived experience of people like Siby Poulose, a farmer from central Kerala, bears the truth out. “When my father divided his land, my sisters were given only some gold ornaments and told that was enough,” he recalls. “The judgment existed; we all knew about it. But no one dared to question the family arrangement. If they had, they would have been branded greedy and cut off from everyone.”
Beyond the courtroom: A school called Pallikoodam
Mary Roy’s defiance was not limited to the courts. In 1979, she founded Corpus Christi High School in Kottayam – later renamed Pallikoodam. Here, she sought to dismantle the rote-learning culture of Kerala’s schools. Pallikoodam became an experiment in free thought: students painted murals, staged plays, debated politics and were taught to question authority.
Her methods were uncompromising. Alumni remember her as both terrifying and transformative. She demanded excellence, punished laziness and nurtured originality. For Mary, education was not about marksheets but about building fearless citizens.
Through Pallikoodam, she gave Kerala generations of children who carried her imprint: a refusal to bow down and a courage to dissent.
A daughter’s reckoning
For Arundhati, however, Mary was not only a public reformer but an overwhelming presence at home. The memoir reveals a relationship riddled with turbulence. The qualities that made Mary unstoppable in the courtroom made her formidable at the dining table.
“She gave me the weapons,” Arundhati writes, “and occasionally, she turned them on me.”
If The God of Small Things allowed Arundhati to fictionalise fragments of her mother in the fiery figure of Ammu, the memoir strips away the disguise. It presents Mary as a multifaceted, contradictory human being: brilliant and bruising, an emancipator and an enforcer.
The unfinished legacy
Mary died in September 2022, at 89, leaving behind a school, a landmark judgment, and two children shaped indelibly by her force. But her legacy is still being contested. For every woman who secured her inheritance because of Mary, countless others remain silent. For every tribute to her courage, there is a whisper in Kerala’s Christian homes that “daughters should not disturb family unity”.
This is why Arundhati’s memoir matters beyond the personal. By reclaiming her mother in prose, she reopens a public debate about the limits of law and the weight of custom. Mary may have rewritten the statute books, but until Kerala’s families shed their patriarchal habits, her revolution remains incomplete.
And yet, even in incompleteness, her life changed the landscape. She showed that one woman could take on church, kin and custom – and win. She restored self-pride to generations of Christian women, even if the promise of equality remains only partially fulfilled.
“Nearly 40 years after the verdict, the paradox is clear. The Supreme Court gave Christian women equality, but within households, patriarchy still rules. Daughters are told their gold ornaments are their ‘share’. Property is quietly transferred to the sons. Women who challenge their brothers are branded greedy and disruptive. Churches rarely intervene,” says Sonia Annice Titus.
“Legal equality exists, but social practice has found ways around it. Mary Roy may have won the war on paper, but in Kerala’s villages, the skirmishes continue every day,” she said.
In Kerala’s memory, Mary will always be the woman who refused to bow down. In her daughter’s memory, Mary embodies both shelter and storm. And in history’s memory, she will remain the change-maker who proved that justice on paper is only the first step toward justice in life. And perhaps that is her truest legacy: to remind us that justice is never complete with a single verdict, that change demands not just law but courage and persistence.
Mary Roy cracked the edifice. It is up to Kerala to finish the demolition.
