Person · Christian mystic & preacher · India
Sadhu Sundar Singh
Also known as Sadhu Sundar Singh, Sundar Singh, Punjabi Sadhu, Apostle to Tibet
Punjabi Christian mystic (1889–1929) born into a Sikh family at Rampur, converted at fifteen after a vision of Christ, and spent the rest of his life as an itinerant sadhu in saffron robes carrying only a New Testament. He crossed into Tibet from Kashmir, Sikkim and the Ladakh passes more than twenty times to preach and disappeared on his twentieth attempt to re-enter in 1929. His Christianity was Indian in form — sadhu's robe, bhajan-style hymns, mystical experience over doctrine — and he was publicly debated by Gandhi, who admired his method, and feted at St. Stephen's College in Delhi and at Cambridge.
- Date
- 1889–1929
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Tradition
- Sadhu Sundar Singh's own writings including At the Master's Feet and With and Without Christ; biographies by B.H. Streeter (1921) and A.J. Appasamy.
- Confidence
- Established / referenced — His 1929 disappearance in Tibet is documented; manner of death unknown
Worth knowing
He is the Indian Christian figure Protestant and Catholic missionaries both claimed, and the one Hindu reformers quoted most comfortably — Tagore wrote to him and received him at Shantiniketan. His disappearance on the 1929 Tibet journey was never resolved; no body was recovered and no credible report of his death came back.
About the place
Placed at Rampur in Punjab (his birthplace); his life was itinerant between the Simla hills, Kashmir and Tibet.
Connections (3)
- Missionary journey toTibet (Bod)
Sadhu Sundar Singh crossed into Tibet more than twenty times between 1908 and 1929, from the Kashmir, Sikkim and Ladakh frontiers, carrying only the New Testament in Urdu and preaching through the villages of the high plateau. He wrote accounts of his encounters with Tibetan lamas and village households and spoke of Christ in terms deliberately adapted to the Vajrayana Buddhist listener. On his final journey in April 1929 he disappeared somewhere on the way to Mount Kailasa and was never seen again; the manner of his death remains unknown.
- Affiliated withSt. Stephen's College, Delhi
Sadhu Sundar Singh's long association with St. Stephen's College in Delhi began through C.F. Andrews, the college's most consequential teacher of the 1900s and 1910s, who introduced him to the Delhi Christian community and later arranged his Western lecture tours. Sundar Singh addressed the college chapel several times through the 1910s and 1920s in his saffron sadhu's robe, and the Stephania community adopted him as the Indian Christian figure to its Protestant mission; through Andrews the connection also tied him to Gandhi and Tagore at Shantiniketan.
- Publicly debated withMohandās Karamchand Gandhi
Gandhi and Sadhu Sundar Singh met at Sabarmati in the 1910s and engaged in sustained public exchange on whether Christianity could become genuinely Indian without ceasing to be Christianity. Gandhi admired Sundar Singh's sadhu-form Christianity — the saffron robe, the itinerant method, the bhajan-style hymns — and used him as the example of what Christian mission in India ought to look like if it were serious. Sundar Singh, for his part, considered Gandhi closer to Christ in method than most European missionaries.