Exposing patriarchy's smothering tactics

There is a line of Indian women writing in English dismantling the symbolic uses of 'motherhood' and 'daughterhood'. Manju Kapur's 1998 novel, Difficult Daughters, is a poignant example. In writing a Partition story through a daughter struggling against her mother, Kapur cracked the pious, dutiful image of the mother wide open.

Anita Desai, and later Kiran Desai, chronicled the mother-daughter bond in unsentimental, unsparing ways that captured its silences as much as its intimacy. Kamala Das shocked the literary world by confessing the unruly tangle of being both a daughter and a desiring woman, while Githa Hariharan reimagined myth itself in her 1992 novel, The Thousand Faces of Night, exposing the disquieting truths buried under goddess-worship.

Arundhati Roy, in her new memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, steps into this lineage and amplifies its potential at a moment when the nation is aggressively remythologising womanhood. With her unsparing gaze, she adds a new and necessary strike, wading straight to the heart of the matter in a conservative India at a time when few others will risk it.


Roy arrives to a fact: try to love your mother by distancing yourself from her, if you have to. See her intent. Admire her. Forgive her. These are pieces of wisdom that can only be passed down by women writers, distinct from the patriarchal teachings that fix 'Bharat Mata' as a myth rather than a human.

To hold the belief that religions oppress women by giving them roles, and glorifying those roles, is considered a feminist conspiracy today. To protest the emphasis on motherhood above everything else as 'regressive' is labelled a feminist agenda. People just keep quiet. Few dare to point out the obvious: if women are so exalted, why do crime against women, subjugation, and exclusion mark their everyday lives?

The taboo of saying, 'My mother hurt me,' remains deeper than that of blasphemy or dissent. And if you notice one thing about 'Bharat Mata Nation', no one names their daughter 'Bharat'. In practice, Bharat Mata is not a woman of agency at all, but a benign reproductive figure producing valiant sons called Bharat. To humanise her is to break the spell of male control.

Roy does what she has always done: says her piece. From the time she was an unknown byline who challenged star director Shekhar Kapur's exploitative portrayal of Phoolan Devi in the 1994 film Bandit Queen in the pages of a news magazine by taking on the male gaze, she has named names with a fierce elegance that stuns. Now, in fronting her late mother - flawed, exceptional Mary - she shows how Arundhati became Arundhati. Flawed, because patriarchy makes us all flawed. Exceptional, because some mothers create daughters strong enough to expose it.

But this time, it's no rookie's rebellion. Roy is, by now, a Booker Prize winner, spent a night in jail under Congress rule, been branded a witch under BJP rule, topping populist lists of women who should be tied to a truck and paraded. She predicted with astonishing clarity the collapse of secularism in India, and indicted destructive capitalism.

She dissected the nuclear state, stood with Kashmiris, mapped the violence hidden under India's 'shining' story. Roy writes now from the position of one who has lived, lost, and made peace with belonging nowhere.

The Roy-haters are predictably out. But if VS Naipaul could confess to cruelty towards women and be applauded for his 'honesty,' why is Roy's reckoning with her mother read as betrayal? For her readers, this double standard is precisely the hypocrisy she has always exposed.

And yet, there's also the other usual chorus: the 'I don't agree with her on many things... but I defend her free speech' brigade. Even the most liberal of liberals tend to distance themselves from the integrity with which Roy holds to her narrative.

But it no longer matters if you like or dislike her, agree or disagree with her. Roy has long since risen to a height where such opinions are irrelevant. She writes to her readers as naturally and intimately as her mother Mary comes to her.