Mother Mary Comes to Me

The novel’s title is a complex, multi-faceted symbol that helps the author to characterize her mother and explore The Tension Between Public Legacy and Private Identity. The epithet “Mother Mary” is taken from the Beatles song “Let it Be.” In the song, Mother Mary is a compassionate figure who provides solace to the speaker, much like the ideal maternal figure of Mother Mary, Jesus’s mother, in Catholicism and other branches of Christianity. Arundhati’s choice to associate her own mother with “Mother Mary” in spite of her lifetime of abuse is a nod to the many years she spent processing the impact of her mother’s toxicity and her ultimate choice to embrace forgiveness rather than resentment.

The “solace” that Mary Roy provides Arundhati does not take the form of motherly love. Rather, it is located within the example that Mary sets for her daughter. Mary is a stalwart defender of women’s rights and fights bitterly for gender equality in India. She values independence, intellect, and her career and encourages Arundhati to do the same. Mary’s engagement with India’s fraught politics becomes a source of inspiration for Arundhati as she begins her own battle for class equality and for fair treatment of India’s Muslim minority. She notes in her dedication that her own mother never encouraged her to “Let it be,” and what she means by this is that Mary was willing to fight for a fairer India and wanted her daughter to do the same (dedication page). Although Mary would never adopt a kinder attitude towards Arundhati, she does follow her daughter’s political activism closely and is, in her own way, proud of Arundhati’s work.

The moniker “Mother Mary,” however, has another meaning. Arundhati notes early in the memoir that her mother, once she opened her school, became “Mrs. Roy,” even to her children. Arundhati bears witness to the way that her mother “mothers” her students and the gulf between her treatment of her students and her mistreatment of her children. She never feels that she has a traditional mother or a healthy parent-child relationship. “Mother Mary” is thus, in part, subtly ironic. Arundhati does not feel, in childhood or in her early adulthood, that she has a mother. “Mother Mary” is a mother only to her students.

It is not until Arundhati becomes a writer and an activist that she feels she has earned her mother’s respect. At the point that she is an established author and political warrior, her mother has finally become a mother figure, and “Mother Mary” is a more fitting way to characterize her.