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Articles

Vol. 3 No. 2 (2026): ILN Journal: Indian Literary Narratives

Who Never Said “Let It Be": Music, Irony, and the Maternal Counter-Text in Arundhati Roy's Mother Mary Comes to Me

Submitted
19 April 2026
Published
2026-06-30

Abstract

Arundhati Roy’s debut memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me (2025) takes its title from “Let It Be,” the Beatles’ canonical hymn to consolation and surrender. Yet the memoir itself is an act of sustained refusal. Neither Roy nor her mother Mary ever let anything be. This paper argues that Roy deploys “Let It Be” as a deliberate ironic counter-text. This irony is structural. It organises the memoir's narrative of self-formation and artistic becoming. The argument draws on the theory of the grain of the voice by Roland Barthes, the framework of musical meaning in literary texts by Lawrence Kramer, and the distinction between the symbolic and the semiotic by Julia Kristeva. The paper reads Roy’s sonic autobiography and her recurring invocations of the Beatles, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix as a grammar of resistance. In the context of 1970s postcolonial India, Western popular music functioned for Roy as a third space in Homi Bhabha’s sense: a site where a young woman from Kerala could imagine a self-exceeding the demands of caste and the formidable mother who was simultaneously her shelter and her storm. To read Mother Mary Comes to Me through the lens of music-literature theory is to recover a dimension of the text that conventional memoir criticism has not yet addressed. Roy's memoir is, at its deepest level, a score written against a song she could never stop hearing.

References

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