Mary Roy

Mary Roy (7 November 1933 – 1 September 2022) was an Indian educator and women's rights activist known for winning a Supreme Court lawsuit in 1986 against the inheritance law prevalent within the Syrian Malabar Nasrani (or Syrian Christian) community of Kerala. The judgement ensured equal rights for Syrian Christian women as with their male siblings in their ancestral property. Until then, the Syrian Christian community in Kerala were subject to the provisions of the Travancore Christian Succession Act of 1916 and the Cochin Succession Act, 1921 (the kingdoms of Travancore and Cochin being predecessors to the state of Kerala), while elsewhere in India the same community was subject to the Indian Succession Act of 1925. Mary Roy was denied her share of the familial property due to the Travancore Christian Succession Act of 1916. She sued her brother after her father's death for equal inheritance. In the case Mary Roy Etc v State of Kerala and Others which was heard by the Supreme Court of India in 1986, she won the case against her brother. She was the founder-director of Pallikoodam (formerly Corpus Christi High School) at Kalathilpady, a suburb of Kottayam, in the state of Kerala. Her daughter is the Booker Prize winning author Arundhati Roy.