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English Christian Web Book · Biography & Memoir · 1934

Sadhu Sundar Singh: A Personal Memoir

C. F. Andrews

Sadhu Sundar Singh: A Personal Memoir by C. F. Andrews — UECF.NET book-information cover card, an original design and not the 1934 publisher's cover art

About this book

Sadhu Sundar Singh: A Personal Memoir is a 1934 biography of the Indian Christian evangelist Sadhu Sundar Singh, written by his personal friend C. F. Andrews and first published by Harper & Brothers of New York and London. Andrews had known Sundar Singh well for years — "during the years when I was nearest to him and saw him most frequently," as he writes in his own Preface — and the book grew out of that friendship rather than from research at a distance. Writing five years after Sundar Singh's disappearance on a journey toward Tibet in 1929, Andrews set out to record, from personal memory and from what he had gathered from those closest to the Sadhu, the inner life of a man he believed had lived unusually close to Christ.

The memoir follows Sundar Singh from his boyhood in a Sikh household in the Punjab, through the spiritual crisis and vision of Christ that led to his conversion and baptism, his decision to become a wandering "Sadhu" preaching Christ in the dress and manner of an Indian holy man, his repeated journeys into Tibet, his years of wider travel, and the uncertainty surrounding his final disappearance — closing with Andrews's own reflection on what he calls Sundar Singh's "living message" for the Church.

  • 15 Chapters
  • 1 Introduction
  • 1 Preface
  • 1 Notes & Bibliography
  • 1934 First published
  • English

This is a book-information and access page, not a full-text web edition. UECF.NET has not confirmed that the complete text of this 1934, actively copyrighted-on-its-face publication is in the public domain in the United States, so — in keeping with UECF.NET's practice for titles of uncertain status — the full book is not reproduced here. See "Copyright & access notice" below for the full explanation and for direct links to read the complete book at Internet Archive.

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In the author's own words

The Preface opens:

The years, in Sadhu Sundar Singh's life, with which this memoir chiefly deals, were the greatest and the best. He had just come out victorious from an agonizing spiritual struggle, and had found in Christ the fulfilment of his soul's true desire.

And a little further on, Andrews states his own qualification for writing it:

During the years when I was nearest to him and saw him most frequently, his love for Christ was so ardent that at times it filled him with rapture.

The Introduction begins with the scene of their first meeting, on the road beyond Simla:

We had gone forward on our march beyond Simla, along the Hindustan-Tibet Road, into the interior, passing in and out among the nearer ranges of the Himalayas … Then, one day, we met Sadhu Sundar Singh.

Chapter I, "Early Days," opens:

The old ancestral home in the North Punjab, where Sundar Singh was born, was at Rampur, a Sikh village in the Patiala State.

These four short passages are quoted directly from the 1934 source text (verified against the Internet Archive digitization) to show the book's own voice and to establish Andrews's personal connection to his subject. UECF.NET has not reproduced the chapters themselves; use the links above to read the complete book at Internet Archive.

Table of Contents

This is the complete chapter listing of the 1934 edition, transcribed directly from the book's own Table of Contents page and cross-checked against the chapter openings inside the book. Every entry links to the complete book at Internet Archive, where you can turn to that exact page. The Internet Archive scan of this item runs to 233 page-images in total; the printed pagination inside the book itself runs from Preface (p. ix) to the Bibliography (p. 203) — the difference is covers, blanks, and other unnumbered leaves that the scanner captured.

Copyright & access notice

Sadhu Sundar Singh: A Personal Memoir carries an explicit copyright notice — "Copyright, 1934, by Harper & Brothers" — in the printed book itself, and the Internet Archive catalog record for this item likewise lists Harper & Brothers as the copyright owner, with no public-domain or open-license mark. UECF.NET has not been able to confirm, one way or the other, whether that 1934 U.S. copyright was renewed in its 28th year (as pre-1964 works were required to do to remain protected) or has since lapsed into the public domain. Adding to that uncertainty, a separate Internet Archive digitization of this same title (from a different library's copy) is catalogued as an access-restricted, Controlled Digital Lending item — the Archive's own way of marking a book it has not cleared for open, unrestricted access.

Faced with that uncertainty, and consistent with UECF.NET's approach elsewhere on this site, UECF.NET is not publishing, scanning, or mirroring the complete text of this book. This page instead presents verified bibliographic information, a handful of short quotations used to introduce the book's own voice, the book's real table of contents, and biographical background about its author and subject — together with direct links to read the complete book at its source.

The specific Internet Archive item this page draws from and links to (identifier sadhusundarsingh006425mbp, a Universal Library / Digital Library of India digitization) currently serves the complete scanned book, OCR text, PDF and EPUB directly and without a lending restriction. UECF.NET links directly to those Internet-Archive-hosted files below; nothing is copied onto UECF.NET's own servers, and UECF.NET has not bypassed, and will not attempt to bypass, any access control on that platform or any other.

Ways to read the complete book, all of them at the source:

If Harper & Brothers' successor rights holder (HarperCollins) or another authorized party confirms the current U.S. copyright status of this edition, or grants UECF.NET permission to publish the complete text, this page will be expanded into a full Web Book edition with chapters and full-text search — exactly as UECF.NET has already done for confirmed public-domain classics such as The Life of William Carey and The Confessions of Saint Augustine. Until then, this information page is the complete, legally appropriate UECF.NET entry for this title. Spot an error, or are you a rights holder who can help settle this? Please contact us.

About Sadhu Sundar Singh

Sadhu Sundar Singh (born September 3, 1889, in Rampur, Punjab, British India — disappeared 1929) was an Indian Christian evangelist and ascetic. Raised in a devout Sikh family, he was educated at a Christian mission school and, as a teenager, went through a period of bitter hostility toward Christianity, reportedly burning a Bible. Following a period of deep spiritual despair, he experienced, at about age fifteen or sixteen, an experience he described as a vision of the risen Christ, after which he resolved to follow him. He was publicly baptized in the parish church at Simla on his sixteenth birthday, September 3, 1905.

The following year he adopted the saffron-colored robe and turban of a Hindu "sadhu," or wandering holy man — not to identify with Hinduism, but so that his call to India would not be mistaken for a call to Western dress and manners. As an itinerant preacher he traveled on foot across North India, Kashmir, Afghanistan, and repeatedly into Tibet, and later journeyed more widely to Britain, the United States, Australia, and continental Europe, drawing large audiences with his simple, parable-like style of teaching. He briefly trained at an Anglican divinity college in Lahore but left after conflict with its formal, Western style of ministry, preferring to remain an independent "Sadhu" rather than an ordained clergyman of any single denomination.

In April 1929, in poor health, Sundar Singh set out once again on foot toward Tibet and was never seen again. His fate has never been established, and he is generally presumed to have died on that final journey. This 1934 memoir by his friend C. F. Andrews was written in the years immediately following that disappearance.

This biography draws on widely published, publicly available sources about Sundar Singh's life; specific dates in some popular accounts vary slightly. UECF.NET welcomes corrections at info@uecf.net. For another book directly by Sundar Singh himself, see With and Without Christ, also on UECF.NET.

About the author, C. F. Andrews

Charles Freer Andrews (February 12, 1871 – April 5, 1940) was an Anglican priest, missionary educator, and one of the best-known English friends of the Indian independence movement. Ordained deacon in 1896 and priest in 1897, he taught at Westcott House, Cambridge, and was elected a Fellow of Pembroke College before joining the Cambridge Mission to Delhi in 1904 to teach philosophy at St. Stephen's College. In India he became a close associate of Rabindranath Tagore at Santiniketan, and after meeting Mohandas Gandhi in South Africa in 1914 he became one of Gandhi's closest lifelong friends and confidants — Gandhi affectionately nicknamed him "Christ's Faithful Apostle," playing on his initials, "C.F.A." Andrews campaigned against indentured Indian labor abroad, supported the Indian National Congress, and was twice elected president of the All India Trade Union Congress.

Andrews knew Sadhu Sundar Singh personally over a period of years — the two first met, as Andrews recounts in this memoir's own Introduction, on a march along the Hindustan-Tibet Road beyond Simla — and Andrews became one of the people best placed to write of Sundar Singh's inner spiritual life after his disappearance in 1929. Andrews died in Calcutta in 1940 and, like Sundar Singh, is remembered in India as a rare example of a Western Christian who was embraced as a genuine friend of the Indian people rather than as a representative of colonial authority.

About this edition

The Internet Archive record for UECF.NET's source identifies the book as: SADHU SUNDAR SINGH A PERSONAL MEMOIR, by C. F. Andrews, published by Harper & Brothers Publishers, New York and London, 1934 — a first edition, 233 pages as scanned, in English. The digitization was produced by the Universal Library / Digital Library of India project (scanning center: RMSC-IIITH) and is hosted by the Internet Archive under the identifier sadhusundarsingh006425mbp (ark:/13960/t1bk1734k).

In his Preface, Andrews explains that the book was written only five years after Sundar Singh's disappearance, drawing on his own close acquaintance with the Sadhu. He also records his intention to devote part of the proceeds of the book's sale "to the Earthquake Relief work" then underway in North Bihar — a reference to the severe Bihar–Nepal earthquake of January 15, 1934, the same year this book was published. The book opens with a frontispiece photograph of Sundar Singh "standing in the grounds of Kingsmead, Selly Oak, Birmingham, during his first visit to the West in the year 1919," and closes with a set of Notes on related subjects (including "The Franciscans in Tibet," "Christ's Universal Gospel," and "Yoga and Prayer") and a Bibliography, running to page 203 of the printed text.

Andrews's memoir was also issued in the United Kingdom the same year under the shorter title Sadhu Sundar Singh by Hodder & Stoughton of London — very likely the same text under a different regional publisher's imprint, a common arrangement for religious books of that era. UECF.NET has a separate, shorter information page for that UK-catalogued scan: Sadhu Sundar Singh (Hodder & Stoughton edition) — C. F. Andrews. This page — sourced from the Harper & Brothers edition specified as authoritative — is UECF.NET's fuller treatment of the memoir, with a verified table of contents and extended biographical background.

All facts on this page have been checked against the Internet Archive catalog record and the book's own front matter, table of contents, preface, and chapter openings. UECF.NET has not invented any chapter title, page number, quotation, date, or bibliographic detail; where a detail could not be verified, it has been left out rather than guessed.

✝ Themes & related Scripture (NKJV)

The chapter titles above trace a spiritual arc — searching, vision, discipleship, the cross, and a "living message" — that Andrews clearly intended his readers to recognize. The NKJV passages below are not quotations from the book; they are passages on the UECF.NET Bible that touch on the same themes, offered for readers' own further reflection.

Psalm 42
"As the deer pants for the water brooks, so pants my soul for You" — the thirst for God that Andrews' own Preface points to.Acts 9:3–9
Saul's vision on the road to Damascus — a scriptural parallel often drawn to Sundar Singh's own vision of Christ.Luke 9:23
"Take up his cross daily, and follow Me" — the call to discipleship and forsaking all.Philippians 3:10
"That I may know Him … being conformed to His death" — the way of the cross.Matthew 5:14–16
"You are the light of the world" — a living message carried into the dark.

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Publication details

  • Title: Sadhu Sundar Singh: A Personal Memoir
  • Author: C. F. Andrews
  • Subject: Sadhu Sundar Singh
  • First published: 1934
  • Publisher: Harper & Brothers, New York and London
  • Language: English
  • Pages: 233 (Internet Archive scan); printed text runs to p. 203
  • Source: Internet Archive, identifier sadhusundarsingh006425mbp
  • Edition: First edition, 1934

Source Edition & Attribution

Sadhu Sundar Singh: A Personal Memoir, C. F. Andrews, 1934 (Harper & Brothers, New York and London).

Digital source: Internet Archive — sadhusundarsingh006425mbp, a Universal Library / Digital Library of India digitization (scanning center RMSC-IIITH). This UECF.NET page is an original bibliographic and biographical description prepared from that source; UECF.NET did not scan, digitize, or originally publish this book, is not the copyright holder, and makes no claim of authorship over the underlying 1934 work.

Latest updates

  • 2026 — Published as a new UECF.NET book-information page: verified bibliographic details, table of contents, biographies of C. F. Andrews and Sadhu Sundar Singh, and links to the complete digitized edition at Internet Archive. No copyrighted text is reproduced on this page beyond four short, attributed quotations used to introduce the book.

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