Aymanam is a village on the backwaters near Kottayam in Kerala, a place of paddy, rubber and old Syrian Christian families with long memories and longer property disputes. Mary Roy was born there on 7 November 1933, into exactly such a family, and she spent a substantial part of her adult life dismantling one of the rules that held it together. The judgment she won in 1986 changed the property rights of hundreds of thousands of Christian women in Kerala, and it began with a quarrel about a small parcel of land in her own family.

Aymanam, Delhi and a Marriage That Ended

Her father, P. V. Isaac, was an entomologist who worked at the agricultural research institute at Pusa, which meant that much of her schooling happened in Delhi rather than Kerala. She took her degree in Madras and then worked for a time in Calcutta as a company secretary. She married a Bengali tea planter, had two children, Lalit and Arundhati, and the marriage failed.

She came back to Kerala in her thirties as a separated woman with two young children and very little money, and discovered what that status actually meant in practice. The family cottage she stayed in was not hers to occupy by right; her brother's claim to the family property was, under the law that governed Syrian Christians in the former princely state of Travancore, overwhelmingly stronger than her own. That experience was the seed of everything that followed, though she did not go to court for another fifteen years.

Building a School First

What she did instead was start a school. In 1967 she founded Corpus Christi in Kottayam, beginning with a handful of pupils, and built it over the following decades into one of the most respected schools in Kerala. It was later renamed Pallikoodam, the ordinary Malayalam word for school, at a campus in Kalathilpady.

The school was not incidental to her politics; it was an argument in its own right. She refused rote learning, made theatre, music, dance and craft central rather than ornamental, and insisted on the same expectations for girls and boys. She was famously difficult to work for and to be taught by, and equally famous for the loyalty of the students who came out the other side. Generations of Kerala professionals passed through her classrooms. Practically, the school also mattered because it made her financially independent, and financial independence was what allowed her to fight a case that took decades.

Mary Roy v. State of Kerala

The law she challenged was the Travancore Christian Succession Act of 1916. Under it, when a Syrian Christian man in the former Travancore territory died without leaving a will, his daughter was entitled to one quarter of the share going to a son, or five thousand rupees, whichever amount was smaller. In effect, a woman's inheritance was capped at a token sum while her brothers divided the estate.

Roy filed her petition in 1983. She was represented by the advocates Indira Jaising, later the first woman Additional Solicitor General of India, and Kamini Jaiswal. On 24 February 1986 a bench headed by Chief Justice P. N. Bhagwati ruled in her favour. The Travancore statute was held to have been superseded, and the Indian Succession Act of 1925, which treats sons and daughters equally, was held to apply. Crucially, the judgment was given retrospective effect back to the early 1950s, which meant that women whose fathers had died intestate in the intervening decades could reopen their claims.

The reaction within her community was severe. She was denounced from pulpits and ostracised socially; opponents argued that the ruling would tear apart settled family arrangements and set relatives against one another. Roy was unmoved by this, pointing out that the arrangements in question had been settled entirely at the expense of women. Her own decree took a further twenty-four years to actually execute, and she obtained her share of the family land only in 2010. She gave the proceeds away.

What She Left Behind

The 1986 judgment remains one of the most consequential Indian rulings on women's property rights, and it is routinely cited in later litigation on succession under personal laws. Its practical effect was uneven, because many families quietly pressured daughters into signing away their claims, and Roy spent later years pointing this out with characteristic bluntness. She also litigated on other matters, including a challenge to admission practices in Kerala schools.

She was the mother of Arundhati Roy, whose novel The God of Small Things is set in a village called Ayemenem and drew heavily on the world Mary Roy grew up in. The relationship between them was public, complicated and much written about, and the daughter has been explicit about how much of her own refusal to be quiet came from her mother.

Mary Roy died in Kottayam on 1 September 2022, aged eighty-eight. She was not decorated by the state and did not seek to be. Her legacy is a school that still runs, and a line of case law that means a Syrian Christian daughter in Kerala inherits on the same terms as her brother.