Two sets of abstract line drawings on paper were made by the Pahadi Korwa, an Adivasi community of central India, as part of separate collection and documentation projects — the first led by Indian artist and critic Jagdish Swaminathan in 1983, and the second by French poet Franck André Jamme in 1996. The Korwa drawings, as they are now known, have attracted artistic and scholarly interest for their script-like visual qualities and the circumstances in which they emerged.

Pahadi Korwa

The Pahadi (Hill) Korwa are a distinct sub-group of the Korwa of central and northeastern India, who belong to the Munda ethnic group; they are a designated Scheduled Tribe, and further classed as a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group (PVTG). Most live in the Vindhyadri mountain range that cuts across Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, in the Raigarh and Surguja districts respectively. Historically they were known to be skilled hunters and also foraged and practised shifting cultivation. In modern India, the livelihood of many Pahadi Korwa depends variously on small-scale settled agriculture and livestock rearing, and the foraging and sale of produce and firewood from forests, while others are landless labourers often subject to exploitation and marginalisation. 

Making of the drawings

In 1983 Swaminathan, then the director of Bharat Bhavan, organised a visit to the Pahadi Korwa in Surguja and Raigarh as part of the institution’s drive to document the cultural production of Adivasi artists in the region and collect artworks for its museum Roopankar. The initial team of field researchers he sent — selected art students from government colleges who had been oriented and trained — noted the Korwa’s interest in their notebooks, pens and crayons, and their keenness to use the materials. When Swaminathan arrived later with fellow artists Jyoti Bhatt and Anil Kumar, he began making sketches of the community leader and his wife with pen on paper, as an attempt to establish some form of communication given his lack of knowledge of the Korwa language. On his prompting, several of the villagers then produced drawings over a period of days. This was done as a community activity, though they worked individually on large sheets of paper with the pens, pencils, markers, brushes they were provided. They are seen in photographs drawing with the paper laid flat on the ground. 

Later the same year, Swaminathan wrote about the experience and published the drawings in his book The Magical Script. The drawings were exhibited at Bharat Bhavan in 1985. In 1996, Jamme came across the drawings there, and later travelled to the Pahadi Korwa villages, accompanied by a support team including a translator, to collect more drawings in a similar exercise. These, along with the drawings made in 1983, form the complete extant collection of Korwa drawings today. 

Visual characteristics

The Korwa drawings mostly comprise small curving lines that repeat, with slight variations, in defined, rhythmic compositions or patterns, forming rows, loose blocks, or masses resembling trees or clouds. Most use black ink on white or light paper; some are in colour. While there are sometimes recognisable pictograms, most often of bows and arrows, the marks are largely abstract. 

The drawings do not resemble or draw from any known visual idioms of the Korwa, and appear instead to have emerged as unique results of the people’s encounter with Swaminathan and then Jamme. Though the forms do not belong to any known script, they sometimes resemble characters of the Devanagari script, used for Hindi and other languages of northern and central India — largely due to a line connecting the tops of many forms. The Korwa language does not have a script and the Pahadi Korwa are largely illiterate, but given the ubiquity of Hindi in the wider region for official and everyday use, they regularly encounter the script in printed matter and signboards.

Interpretations

Little of what the Korwa artists thought of their drawings has been recorded; one artist is known to have described his work as a report of his people’s sufferings to the government. The drawings’ script-like quality, paired with the absence of recognisable semantic content or syntax, has often been the focus of their interpretations. These include discussions about the distinction between script and image, and speculations about whether the drawings express the artists’ aspiration to literacy. 

Readings of the Korwa drawings often reflect assumptions and perceptions of Indigenous cultures prevalent in mainstream society: Swaminathan and Jamme, for example, saw them as expressing an innocence and purity of experience free from the restrictive knowledge and representation systems of dominant civilisations. The creation of the drawings is often described as ecstatic or spontaneous rather than conscious or intentional. For Swaminathan, the drawings carried a ‘magical significance’ and suggested the Korwa’s perception of the numinous power of written language; both Swaminathan and Jamme considered the drawings visually distinct enough to be seen as works of art. They also drew parallels with the Abstract Expressionist work of some twentieth-century artists, including the Indian painter Ambadas, the American painter Mark Toby, and the Belgian-French writer and artist Henri Michaux. 

The Korwa drawings have been exhibited at Bharat Bhavan, where they are part of the Roopankar Museum’s permanent collection; the Galerie du Jour and the Grand Palais in Paris; and The Drawing Center in New York. The works of some who had been especially prolific, such as Lajamo Korwa, Lahangi Korwa and Ukhai Korwa, are also housed in various other collections both in India and abroad. The drawings also appear in publications such as the anthology Writing on Air (2003) — containing an essay on the drawings by Jamme — and Indian Contemporary Art: Contemporary, One Word, Several Worlds (2012). The collection of the Museum of Art & Photography, Bengaluru, also houses several Korwa drawings