The Indian Pilgrim in the Saffron Robe

In the early years of the twentieth century, a young man walked the dusty roads of India barefoot, wrapped in a saffron robe, carrying nothing but a New Testament. To the people he passed, the robe meant one thing. Here was a sadhu, a holy man, a wanderer who had given up everything to seek God. But the message on his lips was unlike any they had heard from such a man before. He was preaching Jesus. His name was Sadhu Sundar Singh, and he would become one of the most famous Indian Christians the world had ever known.

He was born in Punjab in 1889, into a devout Sikh family of some wealth. His mother taught him to love God and to honour the holy men who passed through their region. But after she died, grief and anger turned in the boy like a storm. He raged against the Christianity the missionaries brought. By most accounts, he once tore a copy of the Gospels and burned it before his father's eyes. And then, in the dark before dawn, something broke open in him.

Here is where the story slows. He had decided, the night before, that if God would not show himself by morning, he would lie down on the railway tracks and let the train end his life. He prayed into the darkness. He wept. And as the story is remembered, a light filled his room, and he believed he saw the living Christ, not the European figure the missionaries spoke of, but the risen Lord, speaking to him in his own tongue. By morning the boy who had burned the Gospel rose to follow its author.

The cost came swiftly. To follow Christ in his world was to lose everything. His family rejected him. His father disowned him. By his own account, food was given to him laced with poison, and he was driven from the only home he had known. He was baptised, and then he made a choice that shaped the rest of his life. He would not dress as a foreigner. He would not preach a borrowed faith in borrowed clothes. He put on the saffron robe of the Indian holy man and went out as a Christian sadhu, walking village to village with the gospel held in Indian hands.

Think of what that robe declared. It said that Christ did not belong to Europe. It said the Son of God could be carried barefoot along Indian roads, spoken in Indian words, sung in Indian voices. Sundar Singh walked north into the cold passes of the Himalayas, into Tibet, where strangers were unwelcome and the journey could kill a man. He suffered hunger and beatings and bitter cold. He travelled across Europe and Asia, and crowds came to hear the slight man in the saffron robe speak of the peace he had found.

Not every story told about him can be trusted, and he himself would have wanted his message weighed against Scripture rather than swallowed whole. The miracles, the visions, the narrow escapes, these come down to us mixed with legend. But the shape of the life is certain. A wealthy Sikh boy, hardened against Christ, gave up everything to follow him and to carry him home to his own people.

In 1929 he set out once more toward Tibet, climbing into those high and dangerous mountains. He was not well. Friends begged him to rest. He went anyway. And there the road simply ends. He was never seen again. No grave, no last words, no certain account of how he died. The pilgrim in the saffron robe walked up into the mountains and vanished into the mist that hangs over them still. What endured was not the mystery of his passing, but the truth he embodied with his whole life: that Christ speaks every language, and wears, if he chooses, a robe of saffron.