Care as Collateral: Maternal Inheritance and Organisational Violence in Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me

Abstract

Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me (2025) has primarily been read as a memoir of maternal conflict and personal inheritance. This article proposes a different critical approach, reading the text as an analysis of care as an organisational regime in which love, discipline, and violence are structurally entangled. Rather than treating maternal harm as an aberration or trauma alone, the article situates it within overlapping institutions of family, faith, and feminism, demonstrating how care functions as a mechanism through which injury is normalised and responsibility redistributed. Through close textual analysis, the study examines the ethical limits of contextual explanation, particularly where genealogies of violence risk softening accountability. It further interrogates the memoir’s tendency to narrativise injury as formative, attending to moments in which suffering is assimilated into narrative coherence and others in which it remains resistant to meaning. The article contends that Mother Mary Comes to Me performs its most critical work not by resolving these tensions but by staging their impasse, offering a rigorous account of inheritance, defiance, and the political organisation of care.