Kafka x Mumbai

January 28 (2026) – a friend recommended one of Kafka’s short stories, “The Great Wall of China” to me today. What follows is my own rambling reflection on it, so if you’ve not already read the piece, I’d highly recommend you do so first.

The story starts off like an essay on the engineering details of the Great Wall, but quickly turns into a Kafkaesque commentary on how the state often compels us to participate in grandiose yet meaningless constructions. Kafka says in the story that the wall wasn’t built in a single long line. Instead, workers were assigned to build small, disconnected sections, leaving gaps between them. The builders are told the wall is to protect China from invaders. A vigilant reader almost immediately recognises that the invaders, the distant, vague, and nearly mythical invaders, are, amongst other things, symbols of bureaucracy, jingoistic nationalism, and blinding religion. It is clear from the way Kafka writes that the emperor under whose command the wall is being built is equally unreal. He is far away. He is inaccessible. Maybe even dead. Yet, he is still treated as the centre of meaning by the masses. Indeed, just as under all authoritarian governments (read faux saffron democracies), doesn’t power exist everywhere while its source is kept obscure? In the description, Kafka repeatedly notes that, although the wall is an enormous collective project, no individual feels connected to it. All they do is build, move, and then build again. Lives of the general masses aren’t too different even now. Isn’t separating labourers from the results of their labour precisely how the affluent remain affluent?

In a follow-up titled “The News of the Building of the Wall: A Fragment”, many, many years later, an ordinary citizen, a father, receives the message of the apparent completion of the wall from a messenger of the empire, a boatman. Since the message is late and unverifiable, it demands faith. Faith not only in the claim that the wall is truly completed, but that it’s also going to serve as defence against the still distant, vague, and almost mythical invaders.

The Mumbaikar in me couldn’t help but draw a parallel between the wall and Mumbai’s ongoing metro project, which always lives in the future yet is guaranteed to solve the city’s “backward infrastructure” and benefit commuters. Are we allowed to ask questions like “Who profits from the change in land values”, “Who really gets access to the project?”, and “Who is displaced as a result of the project”? Perhaps not. Perhaps the only accepted action is to keep faith in what the boatmen of our parallel, namely, official press releases and political speeches, say. After all, the project is always built in language before it is built in stone. After all, projects are less about their completion than about the narratives of progress.