INDIAN ARTIST CYCLED TO EUROPE FOR THE WOMAN HE SKETCHED

Indian artist PK Mahanandia sold everything he owned and set off by bicycle for Europe in 1977 to reunite with Charlotte von Schedvin, a Swedish tourist whose portrait he had sketched in Delhi two years earlier. He could not afford a plane ticket, and the two had been trading letters for more than a year since she went home.

The story started on a winter evening in 1975 in Delhi’s Connaught Place district, where Mahanandia had made a name as a sketch artist with decent press coverage. Von Schedvin was there as a tourist and was curious about his claim that he could make a portrait in 10 minutes, so she sat down. BBC News reported that she was not impressed.

She came back the next day. The second attempt was no better, and Mahanandia had a reason: he was distracted.

The horoscope that would not leave him alone

Growing up in a village in Orissa, Mahanandia faced discrimination from upper-caste students because he was a Dalit. When he felt low, his mother told him his horoscope said he would marry a woman who was a Taurus, came from a faraway land, was musical and owned a jungle.

So he asked von Schedvin if she owned a jungle. She said she owned a forest, played piano and was a Taurus. Her family came from Swedish nobility, according to the BBC.

“It was an inner voice that said to me that she was the one. During our first meeting we were drawn to each other like magnets. It was love at first sight,” Mahanandia told the BBC. He added that he thought she would complain to the police.

She did not. “I thought he was honest and wanted to know why he had asked me those questions,” von Schedvin said.

She agreed to visit his village, and the first monument she saw was the Konark temple. She had kept a picture of its stone wheel framed in her student room in London without knowing where it was. “And here I was standing in front of it,” she told the BBC.

Mahanandia said she wore a sari when she met his father, and that they married according to tribal tradition with his family’s blessing.

Seventy kilometers a day, paid for in portraits

Von Schedvin had reached India by driving with friends along the hippie trail through Europe, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, which took 22 days. When she left for home, she made him promise to follow her to Borås, a Swedish textile town.

Mahanandia took the same route on a bicycle. He left on January 22, 1977, covering about 70 km (44 miles) a day.

Portraits kept him going. “Art came to my rescue. I made portraits of people and some gave me money, while others gave me food and shelter,” he said. He did not need a visa for most countries at the time.

He remembered Afghanistan as calm and beautiful, with large empty stretches and people who loved art. Hindi got him by there, but communication got harder in Iran. His legs often hurt, he said, but the thought of seeing Charlotte kept him pedaling.

He reached Europe on May 28, by way of Istanbul and Vienna, then took a train to Gothenburg. After some culture shock and a stretch of trying to win over her parents, the couple married officially in Sweden.

The BBC profiled him on January 16, 2016, when he was 64 and living in Sweden with Charlotte and their two children. Global Indian also described him as an artist based in Sweden. He told the BBC he never understood why people made a fuss about the trip. “I did what I had to, I had no money but I had to meet her. I was cycling for love, but never loved cycling. It’s simple.”

People reported that the pair are still married and live in Sweden, and that their children are producers on a documentary about their story.

That film, The Cycle of Love, is directed by Orlando von Einsiedel. Firstpost reported that Priyanka Chopra Jonas is an executive producer and that actors Chirag Lobo and Mina Dale play the younger couple, while the real pair narrate. Yahoo Finance said it follows the romance and Mahanandia’s journey to reach von Schedvin.

The 98-minute documentary reached UK cinemas in September 2026, and Filmhouse listed screenings from September 20 to 24, 2026.