17 September 2025

Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary is a fierce chronicle of self-invention

The novelist and activist details how she fashioned herself out of collisions with her mother

Even for the admiring reader of Arundhati Roy who has been amassing details about her life – lightly masked in her fiction and given away in interviews – this new memoir often delights. She’s writing it, she says, to bring to life a difficult, often unfathomable, mother, though it’s centred on her own stormy relationship with Mary Roy, a well-known educator, from whom she fled at the age of 16 in 1976. “I left my mother not because I didn’t love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her. Staying would have made that impossible.” This is Roy’s story: lonely waif in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, South India, penurious young woman in 1980s New Delhi, experimental scriptwriter and occasional actor, and then Booker-winning, beyond bestselling, novelist and essayist. It’s told in that passionately frank style one has come to associate with her.

Mother Mary’s history of meanness towards her children is no petty parental griping. She grew up with a savage father and a savaged mother, and then married a man who turned out to be an all-round disappointment (not least because he was always “shivering” his leg), whom she quickly left, taking their two small children with her. She moulds her children by reading them Kipling and Shakespeare and the opening passage of Lolita, but also revenges herself on them. She seems to have needed to be unkind to her children so she could be kind to the world.

Roy’s extended maternal family, some of them the basis of characters in her first novel, The God of Small Things, are reprised here as their real selves. The uncle with an Oxford degree and a pickle factory looms large as both a threatening antagonist to Mary in a property inheritance battle and a brilliant eccentric who teaches Roy “how to make friends with defeat… the very opposite of accepting it”. Older female relatives are introduced. Roy’s grand-aunt had been a college lecturer, and is single and self-reliant in old age; her grandmother was an accomplished violinist. They sound like rare women for their generation, even by the standards of their elite Syrian Christian community, but we don’t learn anything of how they broke out.

Mary appears to have had an unusual past too but it’s only referred to in passing snippets such as, “She had grown up in Delhi, studied in Madras, was married in Calcutta and had lived in Assam.” In middle age, as a social outcast (a single woman with fatherless children), Mary succeeds in building up a model school with limited resources by always being on the offensive. Roy comes to see that were it not for her mother’s “rage and unpredictability, she, being a woman, would never have been able to run a school like hers in a town like ours”.

The collisions between the two women, who also maintain a powerful hold on each other, persist until Mary’s death in 2022. But what drives the book is Roy’s account of her own determined self-invention, away from Kerala society. Her move to distant Delhi and enrolment in an architecture college has her mother’s support, but she is soon fending for herself. Working modest jobs, hating the idea of social conformity and asphyxiation by the “python-coils of tradition”, she is a skinny, marijuana-smoking, quirkily-dressed acerbic figure, who only has male friends in this era, she writes, because she didn’t know any girls like herself. This is a heady image of an urban Indian woman in the 1980s – one that Roy would cement as she was living it by scripting and acting in an autobiographical film about college life, In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1989), broadcast in the UK on Channel 4. It was directed by the maverick film-maker she would go on to marry, Pradip Krishen.

The jokily inventive style of the film’s young characters, whom she revisits in this book, was assuredly cosmopolitan. In the same spirit, Roy refers to her well-read, clever, anglicised relatives back home as “the Cosmopolitans”. Sans doting family, she is aware that only the advantage of her English education keeps her from doom. In other respects, she is as down and out as the common people she hobnobs with on the streets of Delhi in her lean years.

But such privilege has also insulated the country’s Anglophones. The moral laziness of her own class has been one of Roy’s long-running themes. There is simply something rotten in its sensibility and she starts early to tear into it. “We-the-Audience peep saucer-eyed out of our little lives,” she writes, quoting from her critique of the film Bandit Queen (1994) which rendered the living figure behind that character, the rural renegade Phoolan Devi, into a hapless rape victim and then bloodthirsty avenger – without her consent. “Not remotely aware of the fact that our superficial sympathy, our ignorance of the facts and our intellectual sloth could grease her way to the gallows.”

In 1997, right after The God of Small Things appeared to an ecstatic reception worldwide, Roy joined Salman Rushdie on an American talk show. Rushdie, a pioneer of the Indian fiction in English genre with seven books behind him, was confident about the robustness of the new writing. In answer to his gusto, Roy offered a soft-voiced, but utterly forceful reality check. She agreed that some Indian writers had made English their own, but the deeper truth was that many of us spoke several languages and not one well.

There were two ideas of India at play there and indeed, as their subsequent careers would show, two ideas of literature. For Roy, the writer was answerable to realities at home, and if those got too pressing, one had reached the very “end of imagination” – the title of an essay she published the following year, excoriating the Indian government’s nuclear tests. For Rushdie, though, the imagination was sovereign and India had been, even from a distance, a vein to tap, “a cornucopia, a horn of plenty”. In contrast to Rushdie’s boyish enthusiasm, Roy, younger by 13 years, came across as the more knowing. She proved it by going on to be an engagé writer, unlike most Indian novelists of Rushdie’s ilk and generation. As the poet Adil Jussawalla once said, “Our ends may appear to be dipped in blood – the prescribed blood of others that is meant to baptise the ‘real’ writers of this century – but in fact it’s the usual ketchup.”

Readers went to the political essays Roy would write not necessarily for trenchancy but certainly for their vividly personal style, their mode of direct address. She was pointing a finger at her amoral compatriots. The state of affairs now – the brutalisation of the population in militarised Kashmir, the exploitative corporatisation of agriculture, government repression of a violent Maoist insurrection on behalf of the poor – is even more dire than when she started writing. Understanding who is culpable grows ever more urgent.

Mother Mary is a recounting of both those larger concerns and the private loves and sorrows that went with them. It recalls the comic brilliance of Roy’s debut novel. Her account of her first meeting as an adult with her alcoholic father, in a seedy hotel room where he lies chattering with an almost ghoulish feyness, is a marvel of bleak comedy. Then there’s the playful bombast she’s always been good at. “My jaw dropped, bounced on the floor, climbed through the window, and went somersaulting down the street,” she says of her reaction to an out-of-character remark her mother makes.

The other side of self-invention is self-mythologising, and to this Roy is not immune. Some of her declarations to the media over the years have caused one’s own jaw to drop and skitter away. (“I am perhaps the only woman in India, maybe the only woman in the world, who never thought about getting married or having children,” stands out in my memory.) In this book, she can sometimes exaggerate, such as saying, of her own community of Syrian Christians, that their wealth and education meant they were, “sequestered from the swirling violence and debilitating poverty in the rest of the country”. Wealth and education sequester millions in India.

Roy’s life suggests that to be a genuine Indian cosmopolitan, you must discard the conventions – patriarchy, religiosity, nationalism, caste and above all pusillanimity – and begin afresh. But this means throwing it all out – baby, bathwater and bathtub. You are dead set against all traditions, even literary ones. On the commendable side, Roy has fearlessly unshackled herself; on the disquieting side, she’s had to come off as sui generis. As she’s said before and repeats here, writing her life has been like “sculpting smoke”.

Mother Mary Comes to Me
Arundhati Roy
Hamish Hamilton, 384pp, £20

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