Chronicling Mumbai’s chawls with Amol K Patil

Patil is a chronicler of life, or, seen another way, time. The subjects of his sculptures are workers at Mumbai’s textile mills. They live in chawls, and toil all day to eke out a living. And Patil captures them in action, as layers of dust, fabric scraps and rubbish stick to them.

“I use performative body language. It represents the things that people in the area work with, and around. I wanted to show how the body is always moving. So many of these workers are actually from outside the region, and they take their stories wherever they go. That is the idea behind the cloud-like shape of the body," the artist explains.

TREATISE ON DISPLACEMENT

To the urban lower- and middle-class in India, Patil’s sculptures would probably seem like art imitating life. For the upper-class though, the depiction is far removed from reality as they understand it. It’s interesting, then, to wonder what emotion these sculptures will evoke for viewers in the United States, when they are showcased at the Berkeley Art Museum and Film Archive (BAMPFA) in California as part of Patil’s first solo in the country. It is titled A Forest of Remembrance, and has been curated by Victoria Sung, Phyllis C. Wattis and Margot Norton of BAMPFA.

Patil’s muse is Mumbai, its chawls in particular. He grew up near these chicken-coop dwellings inhabited by the textile mill workers. In hindsight, he thinks he may have subconsciously been a witness to the happenings in these sites that he would pass on his way to school and back. Serious contemplation, however, began only when he read plays on the daily lives of these people written by his late father, Kisan Patil, who was a civil engineer by day and a playwright in his free time.

Life in chawls is a hyperlocal phenomenon, unique to Mumbai. Even Indians living outside this city are bemused by the idea of entire families inhabiting a single room, which are constructed like stacked matchboxes—vertically and horizontally—and where privacy is an alien idea.

Over the years, they have transformed into subjects of curiosity for artists, writers and filmmakers. Now, redevelopment projects threaten the mill workers, many of whom have already been reluctantly relocated to Mahul, an area on the eastern seafront of the Mumbai suburbs that is prone to gas leaks. Others helplessly wait to turn homeless.

It is this discourse on displacement that Patil feels will help his work resonate with viewers, not just in the US but the entire world. “This conversation is relevant in any part of the world because this is a conversation about who has the money and who has the power," he says.

A Forest of Remembrance assumes particular importance because of its topicality: it opened right before Donald Trump took oath as the 47th American President on 20 January. Trump has been upfront about his radical views on immigration, and hasn’t shied away from dehumanising migrants in the country.

FINDING JOY IN CROWDED LIVES

Patil’s work challenges this degradation of life, no matter whose it is. Through a set of untitled paintings, he brings the focus on the innocuous and the irrelevant in the quotidian of these mill workers—coiled phone chargers plugged into sockets, the famous dabbas neatly stacked on a steel shelf, crayon scribbles on the walls, the peeling paint on the walls, and more.

By zooming in on these seemingly insignificant details, Patil elevates their importance. Perhaps borrowing from his father’s theatrical aptitude, he executes these paintings with a rhythmic finish that exudes a sense of joy. He approaches these things with a child-like curiosity rendering them the pride of place of being chroniclers of their owners’ lives. What normally would have been perceived as symbols of drudgery are transformed into something almost celebratory, as Patil gives them a coat of milestone-esque lustre.

Patil is saying that these lives are worth living, and worth remembering too. “There isn’t much the people living in these chawls can do about their homes, apart from painting the walls. Earlier, almost all houses used to be uniformly painted in shades of blue, but now the younger generation, with increased exposure, are choosing brighter colours. Today when you walk through the corridors, you can see the rooms in different colours. And, you can pretty much smell what is being cooked in each house," says Patil, adding, “So the boundaries separating these rooms appear to disappear, creating a sense of a larger community that is sharing more than just the walls between their homes. For me, documenting this is interesting because it shows the changing history of these spaces through generations. Redevelopment can erase these spaces, but not their history."

Trisha Mukherjee is a Delhi-based writer and arts professional.

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