Hannah Glickstein

A review of Arundhati Roy’s recent book about her mother…

In this memoir, Arundhati Roy turns her attention to her mother. Mary Roy, who died in 2022, was a famous activist and educator who, in 1998, won equal inheritance rights for women in her Keralan Syrian Christian community. In 1967, when Arundhati Roy was seven years old, Mary Roy co-founded a school in Kottayam, Kerala, with a female Christian missionary with whom she had previously taught. But the missionary departed over her objections to the teaching of Bharatanatyam, a classical Indian dance form expressing Hindu ideas. Henceforth, in her daughter’s words, Mary Roy became the ‘owner, headmistress and wild spirit of a unique school.’ The school outlives its founder: it is now a secular institution, rated number one in Kerala and second in the whole of India.

Arundhati Roy’s account of her relationship with Mary Roy is characterised by the intense love she feels for her mother as well as the pain of loving a parent who was frequently violent and bullying towards both of her children. Arundhati Roy wonders if Mary Roy’s ‘darkness’ was something her children had to ‘absorb,’ so she was able to ‘shine her light on her students.’ But she does not attempt to unravel the reasons behind her mother’s behaviour. The contradictions in Mary Roy’s character remain ‘un-understood.’ What is so complex about their relationship is the combination of proud support and contempt that Mary Roy shows her daughter. She supports her, for instance, when Arundhati Roy gives a talk to parents at her mother’s school suggesting more students should be ‘in jail for standing up for something they believed in.’ But never expresses approval of Arundhati’s activism directly to her: ‘You’re just deliberately being nasty.’

The author propels the reader into each situation. When Mary Roy berates Arundhati for laying ‘teacups’ when she should have laid ‘coffee cups’ the usual abuse comes mixed with accusations she is a ‘whore’ and ‘prostitute,’ because of a university relationship Arundhati had written to her about. The reader feels the author’s experience viscerally as ‘waves’ of screaming build then abate before beginning again while ‘everyone’ watches.

In early 2022, Arundhati receives a dictated message from her mother articulating love, which she rarely communicated to her children. The message reads, ‘There is no one in the world whom I have loved more than you.’ Arundhati’s ‘rush of joy’ is tempered by fear. The reader shares the experience of the author’s ‘shaking’ fingers as she replies. Such a declaration, she knows, must mean her mother’s ‘end’ is ‘near.’

Arundhati Roy’s prose is straightforward but teems with everyday detail, which brings her mother to life. For instance, she mentions a ‘44DD lilac lace bra’, which she purchased for her mother in Italy with the assistance of the writer John Berger. She describes her mother’s delight: in old age, Mary Roy sits perched on her bed ‘swinging her legs like a schoolgirl’ wearing this bra and a pair of high-top Nike basketball shoes ‘for stability.’

The story of the author’s relationship with her mother runs alongside an account of both women’s careers in the context of India’s turbulent political landscape. Both women fight against laws and traditions which they consider unjust. Mary Roy wins her victory over sexist inheritance laws through a decades-long court battle against her own family; this begins when Mary is told by her mother and brother that she and her two young children must leave an unused cottage, which belonged to her late father – never mind the fact they had ‘nowhere to go.’ After years of battling, Mary wins equal rights to her father’s property and turfs her brother out of the house. Both siblings, it seems, are as bad as one another. Movingly though, at the end of their lives, Mary Roy and her brother become ‘inseparable buddies.’ They sit together, hold hands and ‘sing old songs.’ ‘It was as though,’ Arundhati Roy writes, ‘they had fought each other all their lives…Because nobody else would have made the battle entertaining or worthwhile.’

Arundhati Roy’s own life, after the publication of her incredible Booker Prize winning first novel, is restless. When her husband inherits wealth, she chooses not to remain with him in a ‘cage’ made of ‘privilege, money and property.’ She feels compelled to leave his house and use her writing to stand up against the BJP – who had risen to power that same year.

Arundhati Roy reserves the strongest censure for the BJP: their violent anti-Muslim mobs, nuclear weapons, and oppression of ethnic minorities in Kashmir and elsewhere. Writing against the Indian Government in this way requires genuine courage. Remarks she made on the situation in Kashmir in 2010 caused her government, in 2024, to grant permission for her to be prosecuted under India’s stringent anti-terror laws. Their permission has so far resulted in protests outside Arundhati Roy’s home and a criminal complaint being lodged against her. Roy’s response was, ‘Pity the nation that had to silence its writers for speaking their minds.’ Like her mother, Arundhati Roy is not easily intimidated.

If this book has a message, it is a warning against religious or ideological absolutism. Modi’s violent Hindu nationalism is compared to the extreme behaviour of Pakistan’s government. The uncompromising tactics of Maoist guerrillas she encounters are perhaps matched by the stubbornness of Syrian Christian priests’ reverence for class and for the caste system, no matter what Jesus says about camels and the eyes of needles: ‘I imagined a gigantic needle with a huge, camel-sized eye.’ Arundhati Roy, the daughter of a highly unconventional Indian Christian mother and an alcoholic Hindu father, is an outsider. She remarks at one point that she is not Christian, Hindu, or Communist ‘enough’ for her critics. But being an outsider is her strength. Since the rise of the BJP, she has become an indispensable observer of, and reporter on, manifold brutal conflicts.

Arundhati Roy has a degree of reverence for all of India’s religions. In her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, the Dargah of Hazrat Sarmad features as an important site of prayer. The real-life shrine is for a Persian Armenian Mystic who converted to Islam: people of various faiths pray at his shrine. In her memoir she praises Hindu spiritual traditions and Christian kindness shown to her wayward father at the Hosanna Mount treatment centre in Kerala. She reserves her ire not for her volatile mother but for those who serve ideologies without counting the human cost. She sees in the rise of Hindu nationalism a danger that her country is ‘journeying back to the horrors of Partition, when Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims…turned on one another, slaughtered one another.’ 

Partisan loyalty, as Arundhati Roy sees it, cuts individuals off from the very beliefs they claim to serve. A Christian collector, for instance, who is responsible for banning a school production of Jesus Christ Superstar at Mary Roy’s school in 1990 – purportedly because it is offensive to Christian sentiment – later joins the BJP and sees no ‘insult to Christian sentiment in the church-burning…’ The author clearly learnt her contempt for people who recklessly delight in power from Mary Roy who hovers over her, she tells us, ‘…like an unaffectionate iron angel.’