Educator-activist Mary Roy, who got Syrian Christian women equal rights, dies at 89
Roy, an educator, gender rights activist and mother of Booker Prize winning author Arundhati Roy, died in Kottayam on Thursday.
A four-way partition of 75 cents of land in Kottayam turned into a watershed moment for gender equality in 1986 when the Supreme Court ruled in favour of Mary Roy who had challenged laws that did not allow Syrian Christian daughters to inherit property.
Roy, an educator, gender rights activist and mother of Booker Prize winning author Arundhati Roy, died in Kottayam on Thursday. She was 89.
She had been running the Pallikoodam school (formerly Corpus Christi High School) near Kottayam.
It was in Mary Roy Etc v State of Kerala and Others that the Supreme Court held that the Travancore Succession Act, 1916 and Cochin Succession Act, 1921 had ceased to exist since 1951. The verdict ensured that the applicable law for succession would be the Indian Succession Act, 1925. The two provincial laws were used by the Syrian Christian community to deny property rights to women.
Despite that, Roy and several other women in the community got their rights. For Roy herself, it was in 2010, 24 years after the Supreme Court’s historic judgment, that a sub court in Kottayam executed the final decree in her favour. “My 50-year battle has finally yielded results. The fight was not for a piece of land, but to win women’s rights guaranteed by the Constitution,” Roy had said.
https://indianexpress.com/article/india/kerala/mary-roy-passes-away-8124435/
A Revolutionary Dream called Mary Roy
She won the landmark 1986 case in SC, which gave Syrian Christian women equal property rights, by the sweat of her brow and the grit of her indomitable will, writes Meena T Pillai
Tradition is most fiercely valorised in its many trysts with gender, and the veil over women’s precarity is often unmasked with a vengeance when it comes to claiming equal inheritance or property ownership. Mary Roy’s protracted legal battle for equal inheritance laws for Syrian Christian women was easily one of the most heatedly and divisively debated ones in India, laying bare the gendered faultlines at the core of our culture, where even women, conditioned and groomed as they are within patriarchal cultures, religions and families failed to understand how a woman could stand up against her own family for justice.
She questioned the dubious logic of the received notion that the family is never wrong. Isn’t the family always already just to its’ daughters? She ripped the mask off this romantic mystique that had sedimented around one of the least democratic of all social units, the family, across millennia. That the emperor of patriarchy was naked could only be pointed out by a woman of her mettle who had experienced first-hand the denial of female agency and legitimacy within the undemocratic precincts of her own familial and kinship systems. To expose the gendered economies of the family as a nation in miniature, was also to stand up against its paternal and condescending stereotypes. She did it with elan, standing tall and erect against what was also the most powerful institution in the history of humankind, the Church. Her victory after a protracted legal battle of nearly four decades became the triumphant clarion call of radical protest and subversive female dissent from the rooftops of the so called sanctified ‘homes’, a call that spoke for every oppressed living girl in Indian homes, as for the countless unborn female foetuses denied their inheritance of life and a space to live in their homes, destroyed in the womb by misogynist social stigmas.
She lent a voice to those millions of women who had been silenced across history. Her political irreverence and defiance also became the rock upon which feminisms in India etched many new juridical insurgencies. Through the due process of her battles she also debunked the populist claim that ‘dowry’ or ‘groom price’ is synonymous with a girl’s inheritance, where a social evil was given societal sanction to parade as women’s right.
Her school par excellence, Pallikoodam, situated in the small buzzling town of Kottayam, was one that breathed a fresh song of a vision into the stale quagmire of conventional school education. She sought to craft a new generation, one that was creative, empathetic, and ethical in living a life sensitive of their ethos and environment, one that would not meander into the dreary desert sand of dead habits and ostentatious customs.
Urban legend has it that she once made a card for herself which read “Mary Roy - Dreamer, Educationalist”! May her last journey be in accompaniment with flights of dreams that sing of a more gender just India, where education creates joyful children, girls, and boys, unafraid of living their lives to the full, and pursuing their dreams of variant hues. She leaves behind, as her legacy, not just her daughter, the writer and critic Arundhati Roy, the captivating chronicler of the saga of Ayemenem, but many bereaved daughters of India who dare to translate their dreams into deeds, even while lamenting the passing away of an age, of a revolutionary dream called Mary Roy!
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/a-revolutionary-dream-called-mary-roy/article65837730.ece
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