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During his 1920 tour of Europe, the Indian convert to Christianity Sundar Singh (1889-1929?) was proclaimed a living "Apostle and a Saint." As one Oxford scholar put it, "we feel from knowing him, we understand [St. Francis and St. Paul] better."

Such praise and adulation, however, were only faint echoes of the devotion Sundar Singh had inspired in India, where he had wandered robed in the style of a sadhu (ascetic "holy man") preaching Christ for 15 years. His Indian admirers proclaimed "How like Christ he is!" wherever he went. This likeness, they asserted, reflected a deep, mystical union: "It is no sin to call Sundar Singh 'Swami' [i.e., Lord] for Christ himself dwells in him."

What was it about Sundar Singh that inspired many Indian and European Christians? Like Paul, he claimed that his conversion came through a vision of Christ and that he traveled to the "third heaven" in ecstasy. Like Francis, he imitated Christ's life of poverty, wandering, and preaching. And like Christ himself, he taught in parables and suffered persecution.

Yet in the Indian context that shaped Sundar Singh's Christianity, all these aspects of exemplary Christian religious life had strong parallels in Indian traditions. The sadhu or "holy man" renounces worldly life in seeking ultimate "salvation." In this way, Sundar Singh sought to demonstrate that Christian faith and Indian religious culture had much more in common than the Christianity brought by foreign missionaries seemed to allow. Indian Christians understood and appreciated this, and by the 1920s, many European Christians began to agree.

One of Sundar Singh's parables about longing for God, reminiscent of Christ's teaching, is characteristic of him:

"A woman hid herself behind some thick trees in her garden and her little son came out in search of her, crying as he walked. He searched the whole garden but found no clue of her anywhere. The servant said to him: 'O son, why are you crying? Quit pursuing your mother! See how sweet are the mangos of this tree … I'll pick some and bring them right now.'

"The child said, 'No, no. I want my mother. My beloved mother is sweeter than those mangos by far … Actually this garden and all its fruits and flowers are mine, since whatever belongs to my mother also belongs to me. I want only my mother.' The mother who was sitting in the bushes and listening to all this immediately got up and grasped her child to her breast and began to kiss him. That garden became a paradise for the boy."

Sundar Singh was 15 years old when he decided that the garden of the world, though filled with beautiful things, was not enough to satisfy him. In the absence of God, the garden itself lost its appeal. His growing spiritual longing, unsatisfied by his study of Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, and Christian scriptures, had left him no choice-either he would obtain the vision (darsan) of God or continue to search in the next life. As he prepared to commit suicide one night in December 1904, Sundar Singh received a vision of Christ, who revealed his crucified love to the young Sikh.

This revelation brought him peace. It also provoked conflict. His father, a respected landholder in a rural village of Punjab, was not willing for the family to suffer the political and social humiliation of his son's conversion to a "foreign" religion that predominantly attracted "untouchable" castes. As soon as Sundar Singh made his determination clear by cutting his hair (uncut hair was one of five symbols of Sikh identity), he was expelled from his home.

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