It was anger over her worth being reduced to Rs 5,000 that powered Mary Roy in her long, lonely battle for the equal inheritance rights of Syrian Christian women in Kerala. The noted educationist and activist, who died at the age of 89 this week, was the petitioner in a court case, Mary Roy vs the State of Kerala, that became a landmark in Indian legal history and marked an important moment in the fight for gender justice in India.
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.
