Mary Roy

Mary Roy (1933-2022) was an Indian educator and women's rights campaigner from Kerala. She founded and directed Pallikoodam, formerly Corpus Christi High School, at Kalathilpady near Kottayam, a school she ran for decades. She is best known beyond education for the 1986 Supreme Court of India case Mary Roy v State of Kerala, which she brought against her brother after their father's death. The court held that the Travancore Christian Succession Act of 1916 had ceased to apply after 1951, so Syrian Christian women in Kerala inherit equally with their brothers under the Indian Succession Act of 1925. The ruling reached well beyond her own family. She was the mother of the novelist Arundhati Roy.