MOTHER LODE

Why Mother Mary is having a moment in pop culture

- BY ANJULY MATHAI

You can run, you can hide, but you cannot escape Arundhati Roy and her latest book Mother Mary Comes to Me, about her relationship with her mother. Those salt-and-pepper curls, expressive eyes and deceptively mellifluous voice are everywhere—at talk shows, Instagram reels and lit fests. Much like Arundhati, the book has proved to be polarising, with both her fans and critics ready to wage war in offence or defence of it. Despite all the noise, or perhaps because of it, Mother Mary Comes to Me seems to be ticking all the right boxes; it recently won the 2026 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography and is shortlisted for this year's Women's Prize for nonfiction.

Regardless of its title, the book is not religious. In fact, Arundhati's mother, Mary Roy, was staunchly opposed to religion. She made a stark distinction between religion and God. It first manifested in the disagreements with Mrs Mathews, a British missionary with whom Mary co-founded her school, Pallikoodam (then Corpus Christi), in Kerala in 1967. They parted ways when Mrs Mathews strongly objected to Mary employing two classical dancers, Bhavani and Chellappen, to teach bharatnatyam to the students. Mrs Mathews felt the ‘vandana’, the opening invocation to Lord Shiva, was “heathen, unchristian and unacceptable”. Mary, she said, would have to choose between her and Chellappen-Bhavani. Mary chose and Mrs Mathews left.