A pair of gold-rimmed circular glasses once worn by Mahatma Gandhi himself has been sold for 260,000 pounds (over Rs 2.5 crores) in the UK on Friday.
"We found them just four weeks ago in our letterbox, left there by gentleman whose uncle had been given them by Gandhi himself," wrote East Bristol Auctions on instagram after the sale late Friday.
The antique item was sold within six minutes of bidding to an unnamed elderly man, a collector from the United States.
According to BBC news, the spectacles are said to have been in the family of a vendor in England, also an elderly man. They were passed on from generation to generation within the vendor's family, after his uncle received them as a gift in the 1920s when he was working for British Petroleum in South Africa where Gandhi spent years before returning to India to launch the freedom struggle.
The glasses were originally estimated to sell for about 15,000 pounds by the auctioneers. They were sold for almost 20 times of the estimated price.
"These glasses have been lying in a drawer for the best part of fifty years. The vendor literally told me to throw them away if they were 'no good'. Now he gets a life-changing sum of money," auctioneer Andy Stowe told BBC.
Gandhi's iconic round-rimmed Windsor-style glasses were common during the period when he was studying law in England in the late 1800s and 1900s. He is known to have handed over his personal belongings as gifts to admirers.
