Sundar Singh, the Sadhu of the Himalayas

Sundar Singh was born in 1889 in Rampur, Punjab, into a wealthy Sikh family. His mother died when he was fourteen and his bitterness turned on the Christian missionaries in his town: he publicly burned a Bible. Three nights later, after praying that God would show him the true way or he would throw himself under a train, he reported a vision of Christ in his room. He was baptised on his sixteenth birthday in 1905. Disowned by his family, he put on the saffron robe of a Hindu sadhu and travelled barefoot through the Punjab, the Himalayan foothills, and across the border into Tibet, where he was beaten, imprisoned, and once thrown into a dry well left for dead. He visited Europe, Australia, and America in the early 1920s, refusing to settle anywhere. In April 1929 he set out once more for Tibet from Kalka and was never seen again. His sayings, collected in books such as At the Master's Feet, remain in print a century later.