Mary Roy's brother told her to leave their father's cottage, she sued, and the Supreme Court gave Kerala's Syrian Christian daughters equal shares back to 1951

Mary Roy's father, the entomologist P. V. Isaac, died without a will. Under the Travancore Christian Succession Act of 1916, a widow took a life interest and a daughter took a quarter of a son's share or Rs 5,000, whichever was less. After Mary Roy left her marriage, her brother George Isaac told her to leave their father's cottage in Ooty. She did not sue over the cottage. She waited about 25 years, until she was financially independent, and started a school in Kottayam. In 1983, through the lawyers Indira Jaising and Kamini Jaiswal, she filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court. On 24 February 1986 Chief Justice P. N. Bhagwati and Justice R. S. Pathak held that the Travancore Act had been repealed in 1951 and that the Indian Succession Act governed, giving Syrian Christian daughters equal shares from 1951. A 1994 bill to cancel the retrospective effect failed. Her own claim then went to the Kottayam District Court, which ruled in 1994 that the property could not be partitioned while her mother lived. Mary Roy died on 1 September 2022, aged 89. George Isaac died in September 2023, aged 95, and the house next to her school had been handed to him.