Mischief Makers

Gandhi as a Young Englishman

acrylic on canvas  
30 x 30 in

Joan once said that the spirit of Gandhi rules her life. He was the inspiration for the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence she founded in 1965 in California’s Carmel Valley. And his philosophy of nonviolence and peaceful protest, some of it cleverly mischievous, has been a guiding principle behind everything she’s done in her 80 years.

For this portrait, she rejected the popular images of Gandhi in loin cloth, shawl and walking stick, deciding instead to paint him as he looked and dressed when he was a callow law student living in Britain, making good on a promise he’d made his mother to adopt English manners and customs, even taking dancing lessons.

“I titled the portrait ‘Gandhi as a Young Englishman’ because that’s what he wanted to be,” she says. “You can see it in his outfit and his top hat and his schooling. If you’re a Gandhi person, you probably won’t recognize him. I love that about this portrait. I like to do that in my paintings.”

There is a famous story about the time Gandhi was working as an aspiring lawyer in South Africa and suffered the indignity of being thrown off a train for being dark skinned, an incident that is said to have ignited his passion to fight back through nonviolence and peaceful resistance against nearly 90 years of British rule, which ended with Indian independence in 1947.

If young Gandhi was a changed man when he returned to India, it was South Africa that had changed him. Throwing off the trappings of his past, he discarded his English outfits and posh manners, dressing himself instead in the homespun clothing of the Indian poor. He would often be pictured at a spinning wheel as a symbol of self-sufficiency. The honorific “Mahatma,” meaning “great souled” in Sanskrit, was first bestowed on him while living in South Africa.

“It all started in South Africa,” Joan says. “Something clicked. He realized that his home wasn’t his home. The British ruled it. They wanted him to have an identity card to show that he was under British rule, but he just wanted to burn it. The whole point was to get out from under that.”

Gandhi once said you must be the change you see in the world. In this portrait, Joan paints him as a young man on the verge of discovering his path and changing the world.