The works of the Hill Korwa In the state of Chattisgharh, the Hill Korwas inhabit the regions of Raïgarh in the North East of Madhya Pradesh. During the expedition undertaken by the French poet Frank André Jamme in 1996, only five thousand individuals remained from the Korwas tribe. Long hunters of deer, wild boar, deer and bears, they were asked to become farmers when their forests were deforested and became workers, often itinerant and largely exploited by the surrounding populations. Long isolated in the forests, they have little contact with other populations. They laugh all the time and drink the same. Passionate about the tribal cultures of his country, Swaminathan, the director of the Bharat Bhavan museum in Bhopal, went on an expedition to the Hill Korwas in 1983. Here is an extract from the catalog of the exhibition The magical Script that he organized at Bharat Bhavan: " Arrived at Baladalpart, we give them papers, colors, pencils. All of them start to draw without any hesitation. I expected to find drawings of animals, gods or rituals; what they gave us is so unexpected that I couldn't believe it. They are calligraphic characters, as if the artist had written, rather than drawn. They can neither read nor write (…) These letters are not letters, these words are not words, these sentences are not sentences. I would say they have magical significance. They invoke the power of written words for the salvation of their community. “When they write, I think they take their pencil for a bow. They don't write, in fact, they shoot. They shoot signs which are arrows ”, writes Frank André Jamme in“ Korwa ”following the 1994 expedition undertaken with the translator Archana. These Magical Scripts des Korwas were exhibited at the Galerie du Jour in Paris in 1997 and 2012, as well as at the Drawing Center in New York in 2001. Extracts from the catalog of the “Bharat Bhavan museum Bhopal, 1983, J. SWAMINATHAN, director
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