Mary Roy, activist and educationist who passed away on September 1, Thursday, at the age of 89 leaves behind a legacy that lives on through thousands of students and women that her actions impacted. Mary Roy’s journey as a staunch activist of women’s rights began with her legal battle against her brother George Issac for equal inheritance of their father PV Issac’s property.
In her own words, “we clashed on a matter of principles.” She fought a long and lonely battle against the provisions of the Travancore Christian Succession Act of 1916 which denied Syrian Christian women the right to inherit family property. When she finally won the suit in 1986, it was a historic victory for all women. Her perseverance and grit emboldened the many women who came after her to question the regressive norms that bind them down in a patriarchal society.
Late Poulin Jose from Kalady, Ernakulam, is one such woman whose life was influenced by Mary Roy. Like Mary, Poulin too had to fight for property rights as she had married without her family’s approval. Her daughter Dr Rose Merin, Assistant Professor of English in Bharata Mata College, Ernakulam, recalled that Poulin was “dragged out of her house when she approached her family for financial and mental support.” She hence chose to fight it legally and encountered Mary Roy during the course of the legal battle. According to Rose Merin, Poulin received mental support from Mary Roy during the case. “Amma used to idolize her for bringing financial equality to Christian women. I knew her before I knew Arundhati Roy. For me, Arundhati Roy is Mary Roy’s daughter, not vice versa,” she said.
Ammu, a character in her daughter Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, is loosely based on Mary, and is testimony to her non-conformist nature. Dedicating the book to her mother, Arundhati Roy, in a poignant line that has stayed with her countless readers, wrote, “For Mary Roy … Who loved me enough to let me go.”
Reading through the Booker prize-winning novel, one stumbles upon a line about her childhood that traces the roots of Ammu’s, and in a way Mary’s, rebellious spirit – “She developed a lofty sense of injustice and the mulish, reckless streak that develops in Someone Small who has been bullied all their lives by Someone Big.” Mary Roy refused to conform to any and all norms her whole life. She flouted her community’s conventions by marrying the Bengali Rajib Roy. She later wrote that the marriage was an “escape from the hell that was my own family.” She displayed a strength rare in her era when she chose to leave her alcoholic husband and move to her parents’ home with her two children. In her own words, “A divorced woman was a joke – never, ever do I recollect a word or gesture of sympathy or concern.”
It was her determination to provide her children the life and the education that she had not received that led to her career as an educationist. Corpus Christi High School, later renamed as Pallikudam, that Mary Roy founded in Kottayam, is a symbol of the roads-not-taken that she took in life. Pallikoodam offers a holistic education that encourages students to think critically and question conventions. Decades before the Union Government acknowledged the importance of teaching students in their mother tongue in the National Education Policy 2020, Mary Roy had established a system in her school that taught all subjects in Malayalam until class three.
Former student of Pallikoodam and graphic novelist Appupen, who calls Mary Roy one of the strongest influences in his life, said that the school was experimental and smart because it was she who drove it. She knew every student personally. Whenever a social issue came to light, Mary Roy encouraged her students to mark their protest, especially through the medium of street plays. For Appuppen, “The idea of dissenting and questioning things comes from her.”
He credited her as the influence behind the social commentary, satire and the irreverence to things that is evident in his work. Their bond had continued to grow even after he finished school. “When I am in a tight spot, I imagine how I would face her and discuss the issue. If she approves, I know that it is cool,” he said. Appuppen said that he connected with her as a friend. “I could discuss anything with her and she would understand where I am coming from, much more than many people my age,” he remembered. She is his “guardian of light” and he has made her a character in his upcoming book Children of the Green. According to him, her job was to be a lighthouse, and she did it well.
Mary Roy will be remembered for the passion with which she fought all things conventional despite her conservative surroundings. A passage that describes Ammu in The God of Small Things brings to relief this contradiction – “Ammu had not had the kind of education, nor read the sort of books, nor met the sort of people; that might have influenced her to think the way she did. She was just that sort of animal.”