An NRI owner of a known London art gallery has discovered a lost image of Mahatma Gandhi, autographed by the Father of the Nation.

The art gallery owner, Indar Pasricha, neighbour of Tony and Cherie Blair in Connaught Street, London, says he hopes this portrait ends up in the office of the Prime Minister of India.

Pasricha recognised Gandhi’s signature on this portrait when he found Mahatma’s name misspelled in an auction catalogue in South Kensington when he bought it for a modest sum. The auction house had not indicated that Gandhi had signed the portrait.

The picture was made when Gandhi was in London fighting for his country’s independence at the Second Round Table Conference.

In his earlier comment on Gandhi, Britain’s war time Prime Minister Winston Churchill described him saying: “It is alarming and also nauseating to see Gandhi, a seditious middle temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the east, striding half-naked up the steps of Viceregal Palace, while he is still organising and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the king-emperor.”

It is of great significance that the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), the predecessor of the British Arts Council, exhibited this portrait during the Second World War in 1942-43.

It was artist Jacob Kramer who was invited by Gandhi to capture his likeness for posterity. The image made with black and white chalk on buff paper is a happy one showing this great icon of peaceful protest smiling mischievously, wearing a shawl and seemingly aware that he had the British establishment on the run.

Now, 85 years later, a statue of Gandhi is being prepared for a place in Parliament Square where it will stand a stone’s throw from sculptures of Churchill, Nelson Mandela and Jannie Smuts - all men marked forever by their time in South Africa. Gandhi practiced law in Durban. The sculpture will be erected in 2016 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Gandhi’s birth in 1869.

Commenting about his latest find, the Mahatma drawing, Pasricha said: “I do hope that this remarkable work goes back to India. Ideally, it should find a place in the Prime Minister’s office, as Modi is greatly inspired by Gandhi.”