Academician and women's rights activist Mary Roy passed away here on Thursday. She was 89. Roy, the founder of the Pallikoodam School, was known for winning the sensational Supreme Court lawsuit in 1986 against the gender-biased inheritance law prevalent within the Syrian Christian community of Kerala. The judgment gave Syrian Christian women equal rights over ancestral property as their male siblings.
She is the mother of Booker Prize-winning author Arundathi Roy.
Born in 1933, Mary Roy was the daughter of P.V. Isaac, an entomologist by profession. She did her schooling at the Jesus and Mary Convent in Delhi and earned her degree from Queen's Mary College in Chennai.
She met her husband Rajiv Roy while working as the secretary of a company in Calcutta. She founded the school Corpus Christi in 1961. It was later renamed Pallikoodam.
She is survived by her daughter Arundhati and her son Lalit Roy.
