The Case for Never Backing Down (Even When the Law Really, Really Wants You To)
Mother Mary Comes to Me | Arundhati Roy | Scribner (352 pages)
Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me is a memoir that reads like a courtroom drama crossed with a family saga. And that’s because that’s exactly what it is.
From childhood evictions to Booker Prizes to contempt of court charges, Roy inherited something more valuable than property from her mother: a constitutional inability to back down.
She’s been accused of corrupting public morality, strangling someone with a scarf, and calling a town small. She’s been told she doesn’t behave like a “reasonable man.” She agreed.
The pattern started early. Roy writes about the gut-wrenching day her uncle, and grandmother arrived to evict her family in cinematic detail. Her grandmother, whom she had never met, wore shades like a James Bond villain (opaque sunglasses for her conical corneas), barely spoke yet terrified the children. Her uncle’s message to his younger sister, Mary Roy, was blunt: Leave. Immediately. “It didn’t seem to matter to them that we had nowhere to go” she adds.
Under an archaic law barring daughters from inheriting property, Mary Roy had no claim to her father’s home. Roy remembers clutching her brother’s hand as they ran with their mother through town in panic, searching for a lawyer: “In my memory it was night, and the streets were dark. But it couldn’t have been. Because we did manage to find a lawyer.”
That’s a miracle worthy of its own legal thriller. And the lawyer they somehow found told them the grandly titled but wildly outdated Travancore Christian Succession Act of 1916 didn’t apply in Tamil Nadu, that even squatters had rights. They could call the police if anyone tried to evict them.
“We returned to the cottage shaking but triumphant. My brother and I were too young to understand what the adults were saying. But we more than understood the emotions at play: intimidation, fear, anger, panic, reassurance, relief, triumph.”
The lesson: the law could be a weapon, but it could also be a shield.
A Legal Education
That terrifying scene doesn’t open Arudhati Roy’s searing memoir, but it echoes through every page. The memoir traces how she became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance and above all by her complex relationship with her mother, whom she calls “my shelter and my storm.”
It’s also a legal bildungsroman charting the Roy family’s long, unruly relationship with the law. Mary Roy’s fight for equal inheritance rights was nothing short of radical. She did not leave her daughter money, but something far more enduring. The family heirloom was stubbornness with precedents.
Roy does not draw a through line between the eviction and her own legal entanglements and it’s not needed. She calls her mother a gangster, and by the end of this book it’s clear she is one too. The law threads through Roy’s life like DNA; from what became her mother’s landmark case to her own revolving-door relationship with courtrooms. (One chapter is even called “More Trouble with the Law.”)
After The God of Small Things won the Booker Prize in 1997, Roy didn’t retire to a quiet writer’s life surrounded by awards and tea. Instead, she became that rare thing: a public intellectual who doesn’t just write about injustice. She shows up at the protest. A habit that, predictably, landed her in court.
Her Wikipedia page reads like an activist’s greatest hits. Roy is one of India’s fiercest critics of state power, writing about the privatization of water and dams, India’s nuclear weapons program, U.S. foreign policy, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Hindu nationalism, Kashmir, and the erosion of democracy under Narendra Modi. And that’s the abridged version.
“Madam, I have read your book quite carefully…”
Being accused of “obscenity and corrupting public morality” over The God of Small Things was just the beginning. It became the first of three criminal cases filed against Roy — each one, Roy notes, somehow filed by a fresh batch of five male lawyers. (It’s like there’s a WhatsApp group called Men Outraged by Literature.)
It was no laughing matter. “The criminal case was serious and required me to appear personally in court,” Roy writes. “The idea was to humiliate me and to provide entertainment for the press and the public by reading aloud what the lawyers considered to be the obscene portions of the book.”
Public morality, it turns out, is extremely delicate. It faints at the word breast. Her own lawyer, after reading the book, was not exactly reassuring. At their first meeting, he announced: “Madam, I have read your book quite carefully. The plaintiffs are correct. It is quite obscene.”
He then proceeded to read aloud the allegedly obscene passages he had marked, and each time he said breast, he made an imaginary one with a cupped hand. Roy tried not to laugh — not easy — and kept ducking under the table to “look for her pen.”
Her lawyer, having performed his interpretive reading, then assured her:
“But don’t worry. We will argue that their lordships must look at a work of literature as a whole, not just parts. That is the law.”
Always comforting when your legal defense sounds like a book club discussion.
After a few adjournments (Roy traveling, lawyers unavailable, bureaucracy doing its thing), the case finally got a hearing date. In the meantime, Roy won the Booker Prize. “That changed everything,” she writes. “Even though some communists said that it was all an imperialist plot, people were proud and happy that an Indian author had won a big international award.”
The judge, however, began complaining at every hearing that every time this case came before him, he got chest pains. And the case dragged on. Court appearances were postponed for months, sometimes years. Then her lawyer died. Then the judge died.
“I can only hope,” Roy writes, “that the chest pains induced by my book and the case against it were not the cause.”
More than ten years after the initial filing, a new lawyer argued before a new judge and finally got the case dismissed.
“An (Un)reasonable Man”
Cut to 2001, when Roy’s activism made her a reasonable woman with an unreasonable scarf. Hundreds of villagers from the Narmada Valley converged on the Supreme Court to protest a ruling that allowed construction of the Sardar Sarovar Dam to continue. Roy joined them and ended up of being accused of strangling a lawyer with her scarf. Correct. A lethal accessory. Roy would later describe it as “a daylight murder with only our garments for weapons.”
The Supreme Court, which had roughly a bajillion cases backlogged, somehow found time to hear this one. Apparently forgetting the lesson from that childhood run through town, Roy skipped hiring a lawyer for the first hearing and drafted her own affidavit. The outcome: not great. The judges let off others charged but took offense at Roy’s response and charged her formally with contempt of court.
She was asked to apologize. She declined. She couldn’t see what for. Roy was told she wasn’t behaving like a “reasonable man.” Her dry reply: “Transitioning from being ‘that woman’ to an (un)reasonable man in the eyes of the law was progress of some sort, I suppose.”
On the day of sentencing, Roy called her mother to say goodbye, expecting the maximum sentence — six months in jail. Her mother’s reply was pure steel: “Bye, baby girl.”
Throughout the memoir, Roy notes the scarcity of her mother’s verbal praise, which makes this moment all the more powerful. To her mother, a contempt conviction was as good as a Booker Prize. Maybe better.
Inside the courtroom, Roy was given one last chance to be a “reasonable man” and apologize. She again declined. The court sentenced her to one day in prison.
“The courtroom filled with people who had come to jeer and ogle…”
Years later, the pattern repeated. The cause was different, but the choreography of outrage, spectacle, and trial remained the same. A third case arrived in 2015. Five more male lawyers (Batch Number Three) filed criminal contempt charges over an essay Roy wrote about political prisoner G.N. Saibaba. The offense? Calling a magistrate a “small town man” — or rather, describing the town of Aheri, Maharashtra, as small.
Roy was summoned to appear in person before the Nagpur High Court, where the courtroom was packed with spectators eager for a show. Her main accuser was decked out in jewelry and wore a hairpiece that didn’t quite match his real hair. Delighted to have dragged the famous writer into court, he even presented Roy with a bouquet of flowers as his friends looked on.
The judge mercifully exempted her from future personal appearances and granted leave to appeal to the Supreme Court, where the case remains pending.
“Because nobody else would have made the battle entertaining or worthwhile.”
That run through town looking for a lawyer all those years ago wasn’t just a moment of panic. It was the prequel to Mary Roy’s decades-long fight. In 1986 she won a Supreme Court victory in Mary Roy v. State of Kerala, securing equal inheritance rights for Syrian Christian women across India. Sort of. There were more legal skirmishes ahead, and it would take fifty years after her father’s death before Mary Roy finally received her share of the property. It was a Pyrrhic victory with an oddly happy ending.
The inheritance? Gone. Her brother paid off massive debts, Mary Roy had purchased land for her school. Yet in her later years, frail and on oxygen, she and the brother who once tried to evict her became “inseparable buddies.” He visited twice a week, and they would try to sing together.
“It was as though they had fought each other all their lives only because they respected each other as opponents. Because nobody else would have made the battle entertaining or worthwhile.”
It’s almost Shakespearean: two lifelong opponents who finally reconcile. Broke yet undefeated. Only Arundhati Roy could make a decades-long court battle feel like a love story. Or at least a fight worth having.