Sadhu Sundar Singh: The Boy Who Waited for the Train

At three o’clock on a cold December morning in 1904, in a village called Rampur in the Punjab, in the north of India, a fifteen-year-old boy got out of bed while the rest of the house was asleep. He went and poured cold water over himself, a ritual bath, the way a devout person in his family’s tradition prepared to pray. Then he went back to his room and began to pray.

His name was Sundar Singh. He was clever, proud and the son of a wealthy family, and for more than a year he had been desperately unhappy. He had decided that this would be his last night alive.

Not far from his house ran a railway line, and a train passed at five o’clock in the morning. He had made up his mind: if God did not show himself to him before then, he would go out and lay his head on the rails. He prayed, as he later remembered it, something like this: “O God, if there is a God, wilt thou show me the right way or I will kill myself.”

He prayed, and nothing happened. He kept praying. Four o’clock came. Then the minutes went by toward half past four, and the five o’clock train.

What happened next, Sundar told for the rest of his life, in India and in Europe and in America, without much change. The room filled with a light. In the light he saw a figure, and he knew who it was. It was Jesus, the one whose book he had burned three days before.

A Seeker in a Sikh Home

Sundar Singh was born on 3 September 1889 in Rampur, in what was then the Sikh-ruled state of Patiala. The Sikh religion had begun in the Punjab about four hundred years earlier with a teacher called Guru Nanak. Sikhs worship one God and follow the teachings of their Gurus, gathered in a holy book called the Guru Granth Sahib. Sikh men traditionally leave their hair uncut and wear a turban, and the name Singh, which means “lion,” is shared by Sikh men.

His father, Sher Singh, was a landowner, wealthy and well connected. Sundar was the youngest son, and he grew up surrounded by comfort: servants, good food, fine clothes. But his home was open to more than one religious tradition. Holy men of different faiths came and went. Sundar learned the Sikh scriptures, and he also learned the Hindu ones. His biographers were told that by the age of seven he knew much of the Bhagavad Gita, one of the best-loved Hindu holy books, by heart.

The great influence of his childhood was his mother. She was deeply devout. She took him to visit sadhus, the wandering holy men of India who give up home, money and comfort to seek God, and she told him that one day he too should seek God like that, and find the peace that only God could give. Years later, when someone suggested that Sundar should go to a theological college, he said he had already been to the best one there was: his mother’s lap.

Fourteen and Angry

In 1903, when Sundar was fourteen, his mother died. An older brother died at around the same time.

It is hard to overstate what her death did to him. She had been the one who understood his questions. Now she was gone, and the questions remained, sharper than ever. He threw himself into religion with ferocious energy. He read the scriptures of his tradition, and of others. He tried the disciplines of yoga under a Hindu teacher, hoping for the inner stillness it promised. He kept every ceremony. And he found, as he put it later, no peace at all.

He was also attending a school in Rampur run by American Presbyterian missionaries. It was the best school available, and many Sikh and Hindu families sent their sons there. Every day the boys read from the Bible. Sundar hated it. To him, the Christian book was a foreign religion brought by foreigners. India was then ruled by Britain, and Christianity looked like the religion of the people in charge. Its claims seemed an insult to his mother’s faith and to the pride of a Sikh family.

So he fought it. He argued with the teachers. He later said that he threw stones at Christian preachers in the streets, and encouraged others to do the same. But there was a strange thing underneath the anger. He was not fighting a religion he did not care about. He was a boy who wanted peace with God more than anything, and he was furious with a book that claimed to offer it.

The Fire

In December 1904, when he was fifteen, Sundar did something that shocked even the people who agreed with him. “In the presence of my father,” he said later, “I cut up the Bible and other Christian books and put kerosene oil upon them and burnt them.”

Burning a holy book is a terrible insult in almost any religious tradition, including his own. His father, who did not want his son to become a Christian, still told him he should not have done it. Sundar did not care. He felt he had done something brave for the religion of his family.

But the fire did not make him feel better. If anything, it made it worse. He had burned the book, but not the questions. Three days later, he got up at three in the morning, poured cold water over himself, and began to pray his desperate prayer.

Before the Five O’Clock Train

Before we go on, a word to anyone reading this who has ever felt the way Sundar felt that night: that nothing makes sense, that there is no way out, that maybe it would be better not to be here. If you feel that way, or have felt it lately, please do not keep it to yourself. Tell an adult you trust today: a parent, a teacher, a youth leader, a school counsellor, a doctor. If you are in danger right now, call your local emergency number or a crisis line where you live. Sundar was alone with his despair that night, and it nearly killed him. You do not have to be alone with yours. Telling someone is not weakness. It is often the bravest thing a person can do.

Sundar told the story of what happened in the early morning many times, and the details stayed remarkably consistent. At about half past four, he said, the room filled with a bright light. At first he thought the house was on fire. Then he saw in the light the figure of a man, and the man’s face had, in Sundar’s words, “such an appearance of glory and love.” He had expected, if anyone appeared, that it might be the Buddha, or Krishna, or one of the holy figures of the traditions he knew. He had not expected Jesus.

He heard a voice speak to him in Hindustani, his own language. As Sundar remembered the words, the voice said: “How long will you persecute me? I have come to save you; you were praying to know the right way. Why do you not take it?”

If those words sound familiar, it may be because they echo another story. In the book of Acts, a young man named Saul, who was hunting down the first Christians, was stopped on the road to Damascus by a light from heaven and heard a voice say, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute Me?” (Acts 9:4). Sundar, like Saul, had been fighting the very one who was now calling him.

What struck Sundar most was not the light but the realisation that came with it. “The thought then came to me,” he said, “‘Jesus Christ is not dead but living and it must be He Himself.’” He had thought of Jesus as a teacher from long ago, someone in a book, the founder of the foreigners’ religion. Now he was convinced that Jesus was alive, and that the living Jesus had come to find him in his worst hour, three days after he had burned his words. “So I fell at His feet,” he said, “and got this wonderful Peace which I could not get anywhere else.”

The vision faded. The peace, he said, did not. The five o’clock train went by, and Sundar Singh did not go out to meet it.

It is fair to say that nobody else saw what Sundar saw that morning, and people who do not share his faith have explained it in other ways. What we can say is what he himself reported, and that it turned his life around completely and permanently.

Cast Out

He went straight to his father and woke him to say that he had become a Christian. His father, not unreasonably, told him he must be out of his mind; only three days earlier he had burned the Bible. Sundar’s answer, as he later remembered it, was that he had discovered Jesus Christ was alive and that he had decided to follow him.

His family did everything they could to change his mind. To them his decision was not just a private matter of belief. It brought shame on the family’s name and seemed to reject everything his mother had stood for. They reasoned with him. They offered him wealth and position. An uncle, according to his early biographers, showed him a great store of money and jewels and offered it all if he would give up this new faith. He refused. He cut off his long hair, the outward mark of a Sikh, which to his family was a final and painful sign that he meant it.

In the end his father disowned him and sent him away. Sundar’s early biographers record that before he left, he was given a last meal at home, and that poison had been mixed into his food. He became seriously ill on his way and reached a Christian household where he was cared for until he recovered. We cannot know every detail of this; it comes from his own account and from people close to him. But that he was driven out by the family that had loved him, and that he believed they had tried to kill him rather than see him become a Christian, is part of his story as he always told it.

He spent his first night as an outcast in the cold, under a tree, with no home, no family and no money. He later called it his first night in heaven. He had lost everything his family could give him, but he had found the peace that all that comfort had never given him.

On 3 September 1905, his sixteenth birthday, he was baptized in the Church of England in Simla, a town in the Himalayan foothills where the British government spent its summers.

The Saffron Robe

Only weeks after his baptism, Sundar made a choice that would shape the rest of his life. He put on the saffron-yellow robe of a sadhu, the Indian holy man who gives up everything to seek God. But he would be a sadhu with a difference: a sadhu who had found the One he sought, and who walked the roads to tell people about Jesus.

It was a deliberate choice. Most Christian preachers in India at the time were foreign missionaries or Indians who dressed and lived in a Western way. Sundar believed that Christ was not a foreigner, and that Indians should be able to see that the Christian faith could be lived in an Indian way. As a sadhu he owned almost nothing: a robe, a blanket and a New Testament. He took no money, ate what people gave him, and slept wherever he found himself, in caves, under trees, in the homes of strangers. He walked barefoot across the Punjab, into Kashmir, and further north and west. He was sixteen.

The robe opened doors, because many Indians honoured holy men. It also brought danger, because once people discovered whom this sadhu preached, respect could turn to rage. He was beaten, chased out of villages and arrested more than once.

From around 1908, Sundar began to travel into Tibet, a mountain land across the Himalayas, where hardly any Christian had ever preached and where outsiders, and especially Christians, were often unwelcome. For years he spent the warmer months crossing the high passes and the winters preaching in India. He also studied for a time at a divinity college in Lahore and was licensed to preach in the Anglican Church, but he gave the licence back so that he could preach freely among Christians of every church, still dressed as a sadhu.

Stories and Questions

Sundar became famous, and with fame came stories. Some of the most remarkable came from his journeys in Tibet: that he had been thrown into a dry well and miraculously rescued by an unseen stranger after three days; that he had met an ancient Christian hermit living high in the mountains; that there was a secret brotherhood of Christian holy men across India. These stories came from Sundar himself, and no one else witnessed them.

In the 1920s, some scholars, including a Jesuit historian in India and a Swiss pastor, examined his accounts and argued that several could not be checked or were not true. Others who investigated defended his honesty. The argument has never been fully settled. Meanwhile, as often happens with famous holy people, other stories about him grew in the retelling, until it can be hard to tell what he said from what was said about him.

It is fair, then, to read the most dramatic Tibetan stories with some caution. What is well attested is the shape of his life: the burned Bible, the vision he always described, the family that cast him out, the saffron robe, the long barefoot journeys, the beatings and arrests, and the gentleness with which he answered his critics. And he himself warned people against making too much of the wonders. Of the hermit story he said that people had made too much of it: his work was not to preach the hermit but to preach Christ.

What Came After

In 1918 a visit to Madras, in the south of India, turned the wandering sadhu into a figure known around the world. Huge crowds came to hear him in India and Ceylon (today’s Sri Lanka), and then in Burma, Malaysia, China and Japan. In 1920 he travelled to Britain, the United States and Australia, and in 1922 across Europe. Wherever he went, people were struck by his simplicity. He was uneasy with fame. He liked to say that when Jesus rode into Jerusalem, the crowd spread their cloaks in front of the donkey, but the donkey would be a fool to think the honour was for him.

He was not impressed by everything he saw in the so-called Christian West. He said he found many people there living as if Christ were absent, and he said so plainly, though he never blamed Christ for it. According to his biographers, his father, who had once cast him out, eventually became a Christian himself.

Between his journeys he wrote a series of short books in Urdu, quickly translated into English, including At the Master’s Feet and The Search After Reality, full of simple parables drawn from the mountains and rivers he knew. His message never changed. As he put it in one of them, “Christianity is Christ Himself”: not a set of rules or a foreign culture, but a living person who meets people and gives them peace.

In April 1929, in poor health and against the advice of his friends, he set out once more for Tibet. He was last seen at Kalka, at the foot of the hills below Simla. He never came back, and no trace of him was ever found. He was thirty-nine.

It seems fitting, somehow. He spent his life pointing away from himself. He left no order, no organisation, no group of disciples of his own. What he left was a story he told again and again: a desperate boy, a five o’clock train, and the living Jesus, who came to meet him before it arrived.

In Their Own Words

“Jesus Christ is not dead but living and it must be He Himself.”

— Sadhu Sundar Singh, describing his vision of December 1904, as recorded in B. H. Streeter and A. J. Appasamy, The Sadhu (1921)

Think It Through

1. Sundar searched hard for God in many traditions and still found no peace until the morning of his vision. Why do you think the realisation that Jesus was alive, not just a teacher from the past, changed everything for him?
2. Sundar’s family saw his choice as a betrayal of his mother and of everything they stood for. How might a person stay loving and respectful toward a family that strongly rejects their faith?
3. Some stories about Sundar are disputed, and he himself said people made too much of the wonders. Why is it important to be honest about which stories are well attested and which are not?
4. Sundar chose to follow Jesus as an Indian sadhu rather than in the Western style most Christians around him used. What parts of following Jesus belong to every culture, and what parts can look different from place to place?

Read More on Ochorus

Sundar Singh’s own books are not yet in the library, but his author page carries a full biography that follows him from Rampur to the high passes of Tibet, including more about the stories that were questioned in his lifetime. Younger readers in your family can meet him in Brave for God: Book Three, in the chapter “Sundar Singh: The Holy Man Who Followed Jesus.”