Sundar Singh

In April 1929 an Indian preacher wrote letters to his friends. One of them was the Swedish archbishop Nathan Söderblom. The message was short: he was going on one more preaching journey, to Tibet. He was thirty-nine and his health was poor. He set out from Subathu, a small town in the hills of North India. On April 18, 1929, he was seen for the last time near Kalka, a little town at the foot of the road to Simla. After that, no one ever heard from him again.

No more letters came, no word from a monastery, and there was no grave. In 1932 the government of British India declared him presumed dead.

The man’s name was Sundar Singh. He was born a Sikh and became a Christian. For years he walked barefoot across India in the saffron robe of a sadhu, a wandering holy man. In the 1920s he spoke in Great Britain, America, Australia, Switzerland and Sweden. Admirers called him a living apostle and a saint. A few years later others called him a fantasist. Both pictures already existed side by side during his lifetime.

That is why this chapter is a little different from the others. Many miracle stories circulate about Sundar Singh. Most of them come from his own telling. Even in his own day there was fierce dispute over whether they were true. I tell them, and each time I say where they come from.

It begins in a village in the Punjab.

A SON OF THE SARDAR

Sundar Singh was born on September 3, 1889, in Rampur, near Doraha, in the district of Ludhiana. That is in the Punjab, the land of the five rivers in the northwest of India. India was a British colony at the time. The Punjab is the heart of Sikhism, a religion that arose in the fifteenth century and confesses one God. Sikh men wear their hair uncut as a sign of their faith.

His father, Sher Singh, was a wealthy man and, according to the Dictionary of Christian Biography in Asia, the head of the village, with the rank of sardar. Sundar was the youngest of three sons. The family was Sikh, but also lived with Hindu customs. A British archive speaks of a family of Sikh and Hindu background.

The strongest influence in his childhood was his mother. She was deeply devout and took him to see sadhus, the men who left everything behind to seek God. She hoped her youngest son would one day become like them. At home he learned the Bhagavad Gita, a beloved Hindu sacred book. According to his later biographers he knew it by heart at the age of seven. This detail comes from the veneration that grew up around him, not from any document.

His mother also sent him to a school run by the American Presbyterians in Ludhiana, the Ewing Christian High School, to learn English. There he came into contact with the New Testament. He wanted nothing to do with it.

A BIBLE IN THE FIRE

When he was about fourteen, his mother died. The boy fell into a deep crisis. He was angry, at God and at the Christians. In public he burned a Bible, page by page, while friends looked on. That is how the early accounts of his life tell it. A British archive briefly calls it a symbolic burning of the Bible.

What happened next, he told himself. He could find no peace in his own religion, nor in the other books he read. One night in December 1904 he decided that he would throw himself in front of the train if God did not show Himself to him. He prayed. Early in the morning, so he later said, he saw Jesus. Christian History speaks of a vision of the crucified love of Christ. He was certain, and the restlessness was gone.

The date varies from source to source. A recent article by Shivraj Mahendra gives December 18, 1904, at about half past four in the morning. Another source puts it in December 1903. The historian of religion Eric Sharpe pointed out that this story rests mainly on Sundar’s own retellings and on the first books about him. There were no other witnesses.

I believe God can seek people out like that. But I cannot prove it, and neither could Sundar. What is certain is what happened afterward.

SENT AWAY FROM HIS FATHER'S HOUSE

Sundar cut off his hair. For a Sikh that was a public sign: he no longer belonged. His father threw him out of the house. According to the magazine Christian History he also feared the disgrace. In the Punjab many converts to Christianity came from the lowest castes, and a son of the sardar becoming a Christian was a humiliation for the family.

According to the Dictionary of Christian Biography in Asia, his father still gave him a farewell meal. According to later accounts of his life, someone in the family tried to poison him, and he survived. That story, too, comes from him.

In 1904 he went to a Christian boarding school of the Presbyterian mission in Ludhiana. Later he worked among leprosy patients in a Christian home in Sabathu, also spelled Subathu, in the hills near Simla. Simla, now Shimla, was the summer capital of British India. On September 3, 1905, the day he turned sixteen, he was baptized there. According to the Dictionary this took place in St. Thomas’ Church, an Anglican church. Sharpe writes that an Anglican missionary baptized him.

A CHRISTIAN IN THE ROBE OF A SADHU

A year later, in October 1906, Sundar made a decision that would shape his life. He put on a saffron robe and a saffron turban. He became a sadhu, but a Christian one.

Everyone in India knew that figure. A sadhu owns nothing, travels from village to village and lives on what people give him. Sundar carried only a New Testament. He did not marry and he walked barefoot. According to his biographer in the Dictionary of Christian Biography in Asia, he wanted to make Christianity Indian. The Swiss historian Philippe Bornet places him among the attempts of that time to free Christianity from its colonial packaging.

That did not happen without resistance. According to Christian History, Presbyterian missionaries in the Punjab objected to his mixing faith in Christ with the way of life of Hindu ascetics. They saw syncretism in it, the blending of religions. Sundar saw it differently. He stayed with Jesus and he stayed in his robe.

How would you react if someone in your church brought the gospel in a form that at first made you think of another religion?

In those same years Samuel Stokes, who had come to India in 1904, was working in the leprosy colony at Subathu. Encouraged by the Archbishop of Canterbury, he started a small brotherhood modeled on Francis of Assisi. The SOAS archive in London states that Sundar was briefly involved in a brotherhood of that kind. The sources I read do not say exactly how long or how closely.

TO THE FORBIDDEN LAND

Sundar traveled through the Punjab, through Kashmir, through the border region with Afghanistan and through Baluchistan, which is now in Pakistan. He later said that he was arrested there and pelted with stones. In 1908, by his own account, he went into Tibet for the first time.

Tibet at that time was a closed country in the Himalayas, ruled by Buddhist lamas. Foreigners and missionaries could hardly get in. That is why the stories about Sundar call it forbidden Tibet.

His best-known stories date from the years that followed. In one of them a lama had him thrown into a dry well. After three days an unknown helper is said to have pulled him out. In another story he was taken prisoner in 1914 in Ilam, in Nepal, stripped and covered with leeches. His friend A.J. Appasamy, later a bishop in South India, included stories like these in his biography.

Here I have to be honest. All these stories come from Sundar himself. There are no other witnesses. The British bishop Stephen Neill, an expert on Indian Christianity, thought, according to Sharpe, that Sundar had never been in Tibet, although Sundar himself believed he had. The German theologian Michael Biehl wrote in 2003 that historical research had concluded that the journeys to Tibet did not take place as they were told. Where Sundar actually was during those summers, we do not know exactly. The SOAS archive speaks of journeys and preaching in the mountain regions. The sources give no conclusive answer.

EIGHT MONTHS IN LAHORE

In December 1909, on the advice of the Anglican bishop Lefroy, Sundar began training at St. John’s Divinity School in Lahore, now a city in Pakistan. He lasted about eight months. In July 1910 he left.

His biographers put the cause down to conditions the bishop set. He would have to lay aside his robe and would no longer be allowed to preach outside his own parish without permission. That did not fit what he saw as his calling. In 1911, according to tradition, he handed back his preacher’s license. After that he belonged to no denomination at all.

I recognize something in that choice, and I also have questions about it. Following a calling outside any church can bring freedom. It can also make you lonely, and vulnerable, because no one can correct you anymore. In Sundar you could see both.

THE HERMIT OF KAILASH

From about 1910 to 1916 he went out into the mountains from Kotgarh, a place in the hills above Simla. He wrote about his journeys in Urdu, the language of many Indian Christians in the north, in a Christian paper, the Nur Afshan. Those pieces became the basis for the first books about him. Alfred Zahir published one in 1916, and Rebecca Parker, a missionary, another in 1918.

His most disputed story dates from 1912. High in the Himalayas he is said to have found, in a cave, a Christian hermit who was called the Maharishi of Kailash. This man was supposedly about three hundred years old. Sundar said he spent weeks with him. There were no witnesses and there is no account from anyone else. Later Sundar also spoke of a secret movement of Christian sannyasis, ascetics who believed in Jesus in hiding. Biehl found no trace of it at all.

In his book At the Master’s Feet, translated from Urdu in 1922, Sundar describes how he was praying alone in a forest and met a strange man. At first he did not recognize him. Then he writes: “At once I knew that my dear Saviour stood before me.” His books are short, devotional writings about prayer and life with Jesus.

FROM RANGOON TO OXFORD

From 1918 on, Sundar was invited to speak outside North India. That year he traveled through South India and through Ceylon, present-day Sri Lanka. In 1918 and 1919 came Burma (now Myanmar), Malaya (now Malaysia) and Singapore, China and Japan.

In 1920 he came to Great Britain. He spoke in churches and halls there, and in Oxford he met the theologian B.H. Streeter. Then he traveled on to the United States and Australia. In 1921 Streeter, together with the Indian theologian A.J. Appasamy, wrote the book The Sadhu, in which he was presented as a living mystic. On a journey through Europe in 1920, according to Christian History, he was hailed as a living apostle and saint.

The historian Sumita Mukherjee studied how the British press received him. In her view he also drew people through his appearance and his background. He fit the Western image of the wise man from the East, even though he was a Christian. It is an uncomfortable thought. The people who admired him sometimes looked more at an image than at the man.

In 1922 he returned to Europe. He visited Palestine. His tour of Switzerland produced many publications, and according to Bornet the organizers were overwhelmed by his appearances. From April 21 to 23, 1922, he was in Uppsala with Archbishop Söderblom, who later wrote a book about him.

APOSTLE OR IMPOSTOR?

From about 1924 the mood turned. In Germany and Switzerland a fierce debate arose that became known as the Sadhustreit, the dispute over the sadhu. According to Biehl it involved thousands of pages of testimonies, letters and other material.

On one side stood, among others, some Jesuits. One of them was the Belgian Jesuit Henri Hosten, who worked in Calcutta and Darjeeling and openly turned against Sundar. The other main figure was Oskar Pfister, a Swiss pastor and a student of Freud’s psychoanalysis. In 1926 he published Die Legende Sundar Singhs. In it, in Sharpe’s rendering, he spoke of “a morbid confusion between fact and fancy.” Later he went further and accused Sundar of deliberate untruths about his own life.

On the other side stood the German scholar of religion Friedrich Heiler from Marburg. In 1924 he had described Sundar as a saint like those of the early church. In 1925 he collected documents in a book with the telling title Apostel oder Betrüger?, apostle or impostor? Söderblom, too, took Sundar’s side.

In between were voices that were less harsh. His friend C.F. Andrews thought the visions came largely from his imagination, and noticed that Sundar later no longer spoke about them. The Swede Tor Andrae thought he was certainly no fraud, but that he experienced reality differently than Westerners did.

Sharpe, who as a historian of religion wrote a great deal about Sundar, came to a cautious judgment. Sundar’s mystical experiences cannot be verified. In his last book, The Riddle of Sadhu Sundar Singh, published after his death in 2004, he showed how Western Christians had each made their own Sundar. For one group he was a fiery evangelist who died in Tibet. For another, an ideal mystic.

I am not going to give a final verdict here. I cannot. What I do see is this: a man who in his stories sometimes made himself bigger than the facts. And a man who, all the while, for years, poor and with no church behind him, kept on telling people about Jesus.

A TIRED BODY

After 1922 Sundar never went back to the West. He was often ill. He wrote books, usually in Urdu first: Reality and Religion, The Search after Reality, Meditations on Various Aspects of the Spiritual Life, Visions of the Spiritual World and With and Without Christ. Eight books in all, two of which appeared only after his death.

His thinking changed too. According to Sharpe he became fascinated by the writings of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, and wrote to Söderblom about it in 1928. According to the Dictionary of Christian Biography in Asia, he said in 1929 that punishment after this life would not be eternal. Many of his evangelical admirers struggled with that.

All those years he wrote letters to Rebecca Parker, the missionary who wrote the first book about him. He saw her as a mother. His letters from 1918 to 1929 are still kept in the archive of the London Missionary Society, now at SOAS in London. He wrote them in English and in Hindustani in Latin script.

In 1923 he made his last regular summer journey to what he called Tibet. He came back exhausted. By 1928, according to Sharpe, his health was already poor.

THE ROAD PAST KALKA

Then, in April 1929, he wrote those last letters. He was going to Tibet one more time. Friends advised him against it.

He set out from Subathu, the place where as a young convert he had cared for leprosy patients. On April 18, 1929, he was seen near Kalka. What happened after that, no one knows. Perhaps he succumbed in the snow or from exhaustion, perhaps he had an accident in the mountains. Some admirers believed he died a martyr in Tibet. There is no evidence at all for that.

Sharpe wrote that Sundar “disappeared into still greater obscurity.” The image fits. A life that was already full of stories ended without a grave and without a witness.

A CHILD LOOKING FOR ITS MOTHER

Sundar Singh founded no church and left no movement behind. He lost his inheritance, his family and his good name in part of the world. Yet Sharpe judged that no other Indian Christian had had such an influence, in India and in the West. As recently as 2007 a new collection of his words appeared, Wisdom of the Sadhu.

Perhaps you find the stories about the well and the hermit hard to believe. People who knew him closely had their doubts too. You do not have to believe those stories to see what is in his books: a man who put prayer above everything and wanted to show his fellow Indians Jesus in a form that was Indian.

He loved to tell parables. In one of them a child is looking for its mother, who has hidden herself. It is offered mangoes, but it does not want them. It says: “No! No! I want my mother.”

He was fourteen when he lost his own mother. After that he searched for God. First by the railway line at night, later on the paths of the Himalayas, in a yellow robe, barefoot.