Roy masterfully links private oppression to systemic rot
“In these pages my mother, my gangster, shall live. She was my shelter and my storm.” The visceral opening in Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me launches a memoir that is a tender excavation of a brutal family reckoning and unsparing political indictment.
Mary Roy, a Syrian Christian activist and educator, battled caste and gender oppression to secure landmark inheritance rights and built a pioneering school that prioritised girls education in Kerala.
Roy reveals her mother as a profoundly complex and contradictory woman. A tough fighter for justice who could also be brutal towards her own daughter.
Despite her activism, Mary remained entangled in the limitations imposed by a capitalist system unable to fully escape her internalised misogyny and generational trauma.
The memoir lays bare these family contradictions and parental wounds, the contradictory consciousness that placed unknown schoolchildren before her own children. There were moments of estrangement and hurt, yet also awe at her mother’s resilience.
While Mary lies in a hospital bed, she demands inquiry of the caste and religion of every nurse and doctor. Roy picked up a chair and smashed it, the only time she defies her mother.
The memoir also honours the united front Mary maintained when the Indian state turned on her daughter.
She stood by her daughter when other parents disapproved of her speaking out at school, encouraged her writing despite her own negative comments and never explicitly demanded she back down. In those moments, she momentarily puts aside whatever grievances she’s had with Roy in favour of political solidarity.
Roy masterfully links private oppression to systemic rot. The tyrannies of sexism, caste and family become doorways to capitalism’s machinery, remnants of colonialism’s legacies and state violence.
She recalls the media’s grotesque commodification of Phoolan Devi’s rape in Bandit Queen, a film that exploited her story voyeuristically without consent or consultation.
Disgusted after attending the premiere, Roy responded with her essay “The Great Indian Rape Trick,” exposing how such narratives reduce defiant women to spectacles of victimhood. Her critique of the present remains merciless.
She warns of rising Hindutva authoritarianism, embodied by the far right organisations BJP and RSS, and further fuelled by Islamophobia after the US invasion of Afghanistan helped Hindu nationalists rise to power.
The 2002 Gujarat pogrom, in which thousands of Muslims were killed in RSS linked violence that became Modi’s stepping stone to power, led to Roy’s symbolic jailing.
Kashmir, ongoing minority persecution, and the Gaza genocide—all haunt these pages. Roy recalls the 1984 aftermath of Operation Blue Star Golden Temple massacre where Hindu nationalists slaughtered Sikhs in their thousands, beating them to death while police stood by.
Roy says of Rajiv Gandhi’s landslide election that year, “that victory went a long way towards convincing politicians and political parties that murdering minorities helped them to win elections. In the years to come we would watch it happen over and over again”.
Writing these words in the immediate aftermath of the Southampton riots amid the surge of racist attacks on Sikhs only sharpens the warning that in this era of fascism, genocide and protest crackdowns, we must fight back.
Roy’s persistent solidarity with oppressed communities will ignite something fierce within you. Mother Mary and our own mothers’ battles would demand nothing less.
The struggle continues for a world where no woman must be both shelter and storm merely to survive.
Roy shows you cannot divorce politics from daily life—the threads of family and trauma are inseparable from capitalism.
Mother Mary Comes to Me is a tribute to the activist mother fighting wider oppression and private demons. And it’s a testament to how art and literature can be a tool to fuel broader resistance.
- Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhita Roy is available from Bookmarks
