The village where Rochunga Pudaite was born was small, closed in by mountains in rural India. But by the time he died at age 87, the missionary work he did, and the nonprofit he founded, Bibles For The World, was known across the globe.
Known as “Dr. Ro,” Pudaite died Oct. 10 in Colorado Springs, where Bibles For The World has its headquarters.
The organization has sent more than 22 million New Testaments to individual homes in 118 countries.
Together with his wife, Lalrimawi, he launched Bibles For The World in 1971after realizing the potential in telephone directories.
“He saw two telephone books for Calcutta and New Dehli,” his wife explained. The words from ads for Bell Telephone directories — “Let your fingers do the walking” — rang in his ears.
“Suddenly, he understood that these books contained the names and addresses of millions of people,” Lalrimawi said.
“By typing their names and addresses from those books and printing labels, then packing and wrapping Bibles, and mailing them, he could reach Calcutta, Dehli, and other parts of India. It was exciting.”
Pudaite was born in northeastern India in the tribal village of Senvon in 1927. It was a community with a bloody reputation among the colonial British.
“It was 1873. The British kept encroaching on our tribal land. They kept extending their tea gardens. Our people had enough, and one day they sent a large group of the young men down to the valley. And in one night they chopped off 500 heads,” said Pudaite’s son, John.
“That got us a bad reputation with the British,” he added.
In 1910, a Christian missionary arrived in the village, and Pudaite’s father, Chawnga, became a Christian.
The closest school was in the village of Churachandpur, 96 miles away. And Pudaite, the first boy from his village to attend school, stayed there, hiking home once or twice a year, and returning by foot, John Pudaite said. “It was a five-day trip on foot in those days.”
He went to college at Allahabad University, in Allahabad, India, later continuing his schooling in Glasgow, Scotland.
He became a minister.
He met and became friends with evangelist Billy Graham and Bob Pierce, an American minister and relief worker who founded charity organizations World Vision International and Samaritan’s Purse.
Graham arranged for Pudaite to do his graduate work at Wheaton College in Illinois. Pierce took care of the expenses.
During a trip to India in 1959, he married Lalrimawi in Calcutta, the city now known as Kolkata. “When I first met him, he preached in the village church,” she said.
In the early 60s, he completed work translating the New Testament into the language of his ancestral tribe, the Hmar.
By the end of the 1960s, he had translated the entire Bible into the Hmar language. In doing so, he accomplished something that his father had dreamed of: a translation that his fellow tribesmen could read.
Over the succeeding years, his ministry worked with dozens of partners to provide language-appropriate Bibles to millions.
Together, he and his wife started 92 Christian schools, a college, two junior colleges and a hospital and research center, all in India.
They founded the Evangelical Free Church of India, a denomination that now has 350 churches in Northeast India.
Pudaite’s life inspired two books, “God’s Tribesman,” by James and Marti Hefley, and “Fire on the Hills: The Rochunga Pudaite Story,” by Joe Musser.
A celebration of Pudaite’s life will be held at 1:30 p.m. Saturday at the Sanctuary Church, 1930 W. Colorado Ave., Colorado Springs.
Tom McGhee: 303-954-1671, tmcghee@denverpost.com or @dpmcghee
