By Matters India Reporter
Kottayam, Sept 1, 2022: Mary Roy, an educator and a women’s rights activist, died September 1 after a brief illness in Kottayam, a town in the southern Indian state of Kerala. She was 89.
She was survived by two children, son Lalit Roy and daughter Arundhati Roy, renowned writer and activist who won the 1997 Man Booker prize for her novel “God of Small Things.”
Roy was known for winning a landmark Supreme Court case in 1986 that ensured equal rights in family property for women belonging to the Syrian Christian community in Kerala.
She fought a 39-year-long legal battle to gain equal access to the property of her deceased father that led to the Supreme Court judgment against the archaic Travancore Christian Succession Act of 1916.
She had challenged the provisions of this act and the Cochin Succession Act, 1921, which the Syrian Christian community had followed. Under those Acts, women in a family were eligible for one quarter of the son’s share.
Roy was born to a Syrian Orthodox Christian family in 1933. Her father P.V. Isaac was an entomologist who had trained in England. Starting from Delhi, she had a cosmopolitan education and graduated from the Queen’s Mary College in Chennai.
She married Rajib Roy, a Bengali Hindu tea plantation manager from Calcutta who was related to prominent media personality Prannoy Roy, the head of the Indian television media group NDTV.
They divorced and Roy returned to Kerala with her children and took up teaching to support the family. For some time, the family lived with Roy’s maternal grandfather in Ooty, Tamil Nadu.
In 1960, Roy sued her brother George Isaac to gain equal access to the property of her deceased father. The battle, which Roy finally won in 2009, stands as one of the pillars of gender justice in the country.
After three years in Ooty, the family moved back to Kerala, where she started her own school `Corpus Christi’ in 1961. The school later changed its name to Pallikkoodam. Roy managed it for five decades and stopped being an active part of management in 2021 because of ill-health.
Pallikoodam School has championed several socioenvironmental causes in Kottayam. It protested against the official apathy regarding the Vadavathoor Dump problem and formed the Citizen’s Action Forum which discusses such issues.
The Institute of Child Health in Kottayam suffered water scarcity and it was found that the water supply to the quarters of the institute and used to irrigate crops. The water supply was restored because of the forum’s sustained agitation.
The Ministry of Environment and Forests has formulated the Municipal Wastes Management and Handling Rules, 2000. Pallikoodam has also fought against the pollution in the Meenchil River and the use of endosulfan in India. The school has distributed hundreds of waste compost units, teaching people to segregate waste, and the students of Pallikoodam have often cleaned up the nearby Kalathipady road, Karipal Hospital area.
Mary Roy fought a long and tough battle for succession rights of Syrian Christian women. Salute her.
The earlier Christian succession acts stipulated that women gets either one quarter or ₹ 5000/- whichever is less. In the beginning of 20th century ₹5000/- was a huge amount and thus was supposed to help women.