Amol K. Patil’s work addresses the harsh realities faced by the Dalit community, focusing on the lives of people living in Mumbai’s chawls and working as sanitation workers and manual scavengers. His sculptures, paintings, performances, and archival work strongly portray the deprivation of basic human needs – body, skin, touch, access to clean water, food, and land – and the brutal, animalistic existence they are forced to live in. He makes us see a community that remains invisible in the shadow of the city’s towering progress. By transforming everyday objects and spaces into powerful symbols of systemic injustice, Amol draws from personal experiences, family histories, and historical research to create a compelling dialogue about land, labour, and the enduring struggle for equality in Mumbai’s rapidly transforming urban landscape.
PRANITA: I would like to know more about the kind of artworks you have presented in your recent exhibitions, particularly the different objects you used to symbolise the reality of the caste system and invisibilization of the working class.
AMOL: This year, I opened two exhibitions, A Forest of Remembrance at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) and The Shadow of Lustre at Röda Sten Konsthall. I had started a conversation with BAMPFA a year ago. Around the same time, I went to Mumbai, and my brother told me that the Crawford building where my father and grandfather lived would be demolished. Some of my brother’s friends were looking for a place to live in Parel, so my brother found a broker. Our surname is “Patil”, which is thought of as an upper caste surname, and maybe that’s why the broker was really nice with them and took them to show a flat. When he asked for one of my brother’s friend’s surname, he said “Kamble”. The broker suddenly said that this flat was not available. They were all shocked that he had just shown them the house, so what had happened suddenly? When they went home, the broker called my brother and said that we can’t rent the house to a lower caste person; it gets complicated for the housing society. Their buildings are getting demolished, and the people are not allowed to rent a place or buy any property because we are from the lower caste.
I thought I should use this whole conversation for the exhibition at BAMPFA, a sculpture that was reacting to an idea about these moving bodies in the past and present. If we see, these bodies have been here for a long time. In the 80s, a lot of people migrated from drought-hit villages to Mumbai for jobs in mills, cloth factories, and docks. It was a major hub for trade and industry at that time, but there was an issue of housing for the people who migrated. So the British colonial government built chawls, which we call BDD Chawls (Bombay Development Department), with around 100 sq. ft. and 32 rooms on a floor. These people had to fit in these tiny rooms where the entire family or group of workers had to live, with a shared bathroom and no airflow, no privacy. These people came from very different cultures, different ways of cooking food, and different colour tones of their houses. When you walk on the floor, you can see the colours changing, different smells of foods, and different ways of talking; it is all very dramatic and fascinating.
In a few years, these factories started shutting down, and the workers were not paid for years. They were stuck here, as going back to their villages meant debt and starvation, so they stayed in Mumbai, doing risky and low-paying work while finding a place to live and survive. Most of these chawls in Mumbai are being demolished now.
So, if you see this sculpture, it is more performative because the body is performing in this city. It is stuck, working, and moving simultaneously to find a place to live. One can also see that this is also a stuck relation with concrete, demolished bricks, dust, cotton mills, and sanitization places.
