Literary-Star Fiery Princess: On Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me

Mother Mary Comes To Me insists that it is an article of dissent. From its flaming red hardcover gazes a young Arundhati Roy, beedi in mouth—a brand aesthetic around a politics of defiance, carefully curated by designers at the publishing giant, Penguin. The irony here is palpable, as it always has been in the position of globally famous writer Roy and her dissident, grassroots concerns. Roy describes her lightning rise to Booker Prize celebrityhood in this memoir, the extraordinary capital and public expectation it brought, and the immediate aftermath—1998, when she wrote “The End of Imagination,” an essay against India’s emergent nuclear nationalism. Of this decision, which marked her as seditious and excluded her from the comforts of the literary establishment, she writes—“… I hadn’t just avoided the gilded cage. I had blown it to smithereens.” There is something wearying about these self-avowals of dissent across Mother Mary Comes To Me. They draw our attention to what seems to be an anxiety about the legitimacy of Roy’s own political project. Roy, who stages herself as both icon and insurgent, insider and outsider—always seems to be wrestling with this contradiction between her privileged authority and her identification with the dispossessed. 

In the memoir, Roy draws constant parallels between her rebellious reckonings with her mercurial mother, Mary Roy, and her own subsequent “restless, unruly life as a seditious traitor-writer.” The fact that this is Roy’s first foray into the genre of the memoir is interesting here. As a writer, she has long been the expert in drawing out personal stakes. Pramod K. Nayar theorises that Roy’s political essays “appropriate the languages of political polemics but [cast] it within the rhetoric of sentiment—she feels for her nation, the rivers, the oppressed—that [mark] the personal essay...” “I laughed…” begins her essay, The Greater Common Good, where she argues against the construction of the Narmada Dam. In Mother Mary Comes To Me, Roy undertakes a similar maneuver, extending the personal into the political. 

Roy recalls an incident when Mary beat her son with a wooden ruler for having an “average” report card, and congratulated Arundhati for “brilliant” scores. Since that incident, Roy’s personal achievements are always sullied by a sense of foreboding—“On the occasions when I am toasted or applauded, I always feel that someone else, someone quiet, is being beaten in the other room,” Roy says. “If you pause to think about it, it’s true, someone is.” It is of note how Roy provides a public dimension to her pain, invoking political violence in these lines. They, like other encounters with her mother’s fury, are set up to read like radicalisations, foreshadowing the suspicion of authority that would come to define Roy’s later work. When Mary dies, Roy is disarmed by the weight of her grief for her own raging mother. In the passage that follows, maternal and state authority collapse into one another—“If I could understand myself better, I’d probably understand a lot more about the world and certainly about my country, in which so many people seem to revere their persecutors and appear grateful to be subjugated...” Dissent emerges as the natural function of the life Roy has led. Having herself been “motherless fatherless homeless jobless,” Roy identifies herself with underdogs, people conventionally regarded as “failures”, like her eccentric uncle. Mary Roy’s own forceful, inspiring existence plays no small part in this narrative. We learn that she founded a famous school and helped strike down the law that disallowed Christian women from having property rights in Kerala. In writing this memoir, Roy reveals herself to be inextricable from this dissenting lineage. 

Yet something in this narrative begins to ring hollow as we watch Roy flit between New York Times interviews and “intimate” galas with the nation’s intellectual elite, promoting this memoir. For an author who claims forcefully to have been kicked off the “literary-star fairy princess” pedestal, the phenomenal institutional adulation showered over her memoir by the global media is hard to ignore. As an article in The Swaddle sharply pointed out, reviews of Mother Mary Comes To Me have tended to depoliticise its content, turning it into a “grieving daughter-writer” spectacle, a stylish “literary souvenir for the upper-middle class.” Indeed, the press seems content to affirm that Roy's life and writing are “political,”— and leave it at that. Roy has always fiercely sought to resist the elite literary canon which the fame of The God of Small Things tried to box her in. She has written forcefully against state violence, religious fundamentalism, global imperialism and the hypocrisies of neoliberal development. Yet it is worth wondering if she has now been recast as a kind of literary-star fiery princess instead, by the dominating cultural institutions her writing has always sought to resist. 

It is relevant here that criticism has been levelled against Penguin Random House’s connections to “multi-million dollar investments in Israeli tech” through its ownership chain. Not only has Roy spoken out at length against Netanyahu and the “genocide unfurling before us” in Gaza, she has also condemned Penguin’s decision to pulp Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History. In a 2014 open letter, she criticised the publisher’s corporate caution—“You have fought for free speech … And now … you have not only caved in, you have humiliated yourself abjectly … What was it that terrified you?” Yet Roy continues to publish with Penguin. The decision begs the question—did Mother Mary Comes To Me need Penguin to be a dazzling success? Would Roy’s established literary prowess and stardom not have sufficed? The book in itself is tantalising and readable as ever. Roy’s usual style shines—she writes in a spectacular personalised amalgam of pop culture slang, styles from reportage and the formal political language of citizenship and rights, as well as her own inventive, lucid yet lyrical prose. We cannot help but see the language that awarded her a global cult status as we read into the fault lines in her brand of dissent. 

As I was reading Roy’s memoir, the contradictions were hard to miss. A large part of her book is preoccupied with the privilege and “crazy royalties” that buttress her life of “free writing” which takes her from Kashmir to the jungles of rural Chattisgarh. She eschews an existence of “fake, self-inflicted poverty”; she sets up a non-eponymous trust dedicated to sharing her money with journalists, activists, teachers, lawyers, artists and filmmakers who resist the status quo. She flees from the life of luxury and staff inherited by her partner, Pradip Kishen, and moves to an apartment of her own in Delhi, a place from which “nobody [could] order [her] to get out.” Roy is continually defending and justifying the radical potential of her work, making a case for an insurgent kind of stardom. For me, it does not always land. The chapters in the memoir bookended by descriptions of political happenings often do not quite read as seamless. They make obvious something of the constructiveness and the performative quality of dissent in general, especially Roy’s. Roy has always prided herself on being a writer who takes sides. Although her memoir furthers her as both a seditious and enormously marketable spectacle, it is clear which side she wants to be on. This is why Mother Mary Comes To Me leaves me with a complicated aftertaste—its convictions both move and frustrate, as they insist on how they want to be read. Yet I cannot help but admit the power of Roy’s voice. It lingers defiantly, heady and pungent like beedi smoke. As I turn the pages of her expensive, Soviet-red hardbound, I am still compelled to stall and stare. 

(Edited by Maya Ribeiro and Giya Sood.)