Patna: Reverend James Massey, a pioneering Dalit theologian and former member of the Indian government’s National Commission for Minorities, died in Patna on Tuesday. He was in mid 70s.
The renowned theologian had gone to the Bihar state capital for a heart procedure to do with his pacemaker. He collapsed during the process, according to a Facebook post by John Dayal, one of Rev Massey’s long time friends.
Dayal quoted his friends to say that Rev Massey’s body would be brought to Delhi for funeral on Wednesday. He survived by wife and two daughters, Dayal told Matters India.
Rev Massey, an ordained priest of the Church of North India (CNI), was a Dalit from the northern Indian state of Punjab. He was the founder director of the ecumenical Centre for Dalit Studies in India started in New Delhi in 2001.
Later in 2004 it was re-christened as Centre for Dalit/Subaltern Studies (CDS) to include other marginalized communities including the minorities within the scope of its activities. So far, CDS has been working as a special wing of Community Contextual Communication Centre, a non-Governmental organization.
In 2013, it became a legal body, and has been re-christened as Centre for Dalit/Minorities Studies (Trust) [CDS (T)]. This change was made in order to bring CDS more closely to changing socio-religious and legal context of India.
Earlier, Rev Massey was the general secretary of the Indian Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (ISPCK), a major publishing house, based in Old Delhi.
He worked for inter-faith dialogue in the Indian context with special interest in Sikh religion. For his work in Sikh religion he was awarded Doctor of Philosophy by Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University, Frankfurt, Germany, and again Post-Doctoral Academic Degree (Habilitation) in the field of “Religious Studies” by the same University.
Dr. Massey translated the Bible into Punjabi and edited more than 20 books.
He authored several books on Dalit Christian theology.
He defined Dalit Christian theology, which emerged in late 1970s, as a reflection of the Dalit Christians, who form the vast majority of the Indian Christian population, becoming increasingly conscious of their Dalit roots, their Dalit condition and of being oppressed both within as well as outside the Church.
Growing consciousness of among the Dalit Christians prompted them to ask how much of what they had been taught Biblically and theologically was actually relevant to their social conditions. They increasingly realized that the way the Christian faith has been explained did not include their experiences.
In an interview in 2005, Rev Massey said, Dalit Christians had begun to assert that “the sort of theology that is taught in the seminaries and preached from the pulpits of the churches is largely irrelevant for them because it does not take into account their oppressed condition, their experiences. So, I would say that the emergence of Dalit Christian theology is really only a part of a larger process of the emergence of Dalit consciousness.”
Dalit theology for him was “a systematic reflection on God and humankind from the perspective of the Dalit experience.” It sees God as struggling alongside the Dalits in challenging the structures of caste and oppression, both within as well as outside the Church.