Mary Roy’s legacy will be her fight to ensure equal inheritance rights for Syrian Christian women, furthering gender justice

Roy had a tumultuous life — she had walked out of an unhappy marriage and brought up her two children alone and, in an acrimonious battle, fought her family in court for an equal share of the ancestral property. Her courage and refusal to be cowed inspired the character Ammu, the rebel heart of her daughter Arundhati’s award-winning novel, The God of Small Things. In later years, Roy’s life saw a measure of stability, especially with the success of her school, Pallikoodam in her hometown Kottayam.

If she eventually came to be regarded as a pillar of the Syrian Catholic community, her path to this position had been long and thorny. It was hard enough being a divorcee and a single parent in a deeply conservative society: Roy’s isolation only deepened when, in 1983, she filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court, challenging the provisions of the 1917 Travancore Christian Succession Act, which had continued to apply to Syrian Christians after the former princely state became part of Kerala in 1956. According to the Act’s provisions, if a man died intestate, any daughter he had would only be entitled to one-fourth of the value of the share that was inherited by the son or Rs 5,000, whichever was less. In 1986, when the apex court decided in her favour, it cemented Roy’s role in pushing India along the path towards greater gender equality.