Mehnat Manzil: Museum of Work is an initiative envisioned and brought into being by the Saath Charitable Trust based in Ahmedabad, Gujarat in collaboration with Conflictorium: Museum of Conflict.

The Museum is situated in India Colony Ward, a mixed-use settlement in Guptanagar, Ahmedabad surrounded by a variety of workshops, small scale cottage industries and houses. It occupies the ground floor of an old house of three rooms, along with a small outdoor gathering space. 

The Museum celebrates the lives of workers in the informal sector and brings to light their realities. At the entry of the Museum, visitors are given a swipe card and a weighted wrist band that allows the visitor to enter the museum for a minimum duration of 25 minutes under which exit is denied; as a reminder of the fixed work hours a labourer must accomplish continuously. The wristbands, strapped to the arm throughout the visit duration and words “Without Labour Nothing Prospers. But Some Can’t Prosper Despite It.” marked on them. 

Through art installations, commissioned paintings and audio-visual devices, Mehnat Manzil documents and communicates the nuances of the difficult lives led by workers in the informal sector. Exhibits range from archival images of mill workers from the 1980’s to audio pods with sounds from the city’s informal markets, as well as overlapping images of informal housing conditions. Amongst these one particular exhibit stands out the most “physical piece of a sheet of tarpaulin” once used by civic officials to conceal informal settlements, as they were seen as ‘unseemly looking’ areas. The exhibit creates a big statement on societal structure that brings inequality, lack of access and presence of shame around informal housing. The museum also contains an installation of 2 clear glass jars with different proportions of dal (pulses) to water, symbolic of the difference in nutrition between the households of a cook/kitchen worker to that of their employer (an affluent household). 

The exhibits deal with themes such as migration, livelihood, housing and infrastructure, with a focus on interrogating the societal structures that give rise to informality.