Somewhere between caste pride masquerading as “culture” and social media’s obsession with virality, Omprakash Valmiki’s Thakur ka Kuan stopped being a wound. A poem written out of generations of caste humiliation was stripped of its context. It is now celebratory background music for viral Reels for Thakur community influencers.
The history erased. The anger hollowed out. The violence buried.For those who don’t know, it is a poem about dispossession and Thakur monopoly. About a society where everything– land, water, labour, food, movement, and dignity– is controlled by caste hierarchy.
Valmiki, a Dalit poet and writer from Uttar Pradesh, was born into a marginalised sweeper community. His autobiography Joothan became a landmark text in Hindi writing, bringing lived experiences of untouchability and caste humiliation into mainstream literary and academic discourse.The poem traces the life of a Dalit labourer whose existence is tied entirely to the dominance of the Thakur. The stove is made from mud taken from the Thakur’s pond. The bread comes from grain grown in the Thakur’s field. The oxen belong to the Thakur. The plough belongs to the Thakur. The labourer tills the land with his own hands, but the harvest still belongs to the Thakur.Then the labourer comes to the most devastating part of the poem, where he asks what truly belongs to an oppressed person like him? Not the village. Not the city. Not even the country.The repetition of the word “Thakur” here is suffocating. It reflects how caste power occupies every corner of life until the oppressed are left with nothing they can call their own.Which is precisely why making Thakur caste-pride reels on this poem is disturbing. But none of this is surprising to me. Caste pride is the last refuge of those who inherit social power without ever interrogating it. These are the people with little sense of identity beyond the accident of birth. So they cling to caste as a borrowed source of superiority.A woman with a bright red tika, admiring herself through the front camera. A man at the gym, flexing his muscles. Another man twisting his moustache with theatrical pride. A bride in full wedding wear, holding a wedding sword. One reel after another, all cut to dramatic music and a menacing version of Thakur Ka Kuan.What is perhaps most telling is the scale of validation these reels receive. Many are posted by people with substantial followings, gathering thousands of likes and views. The captions on many of these reels make the distortion impossible to ignore.“Some people chase power, some are just born Rajput.” “When your surname speaks.” “In case you guys don’t know my last name…” “The biggest flex — proud to be born in a Kshatriya kul.”And what makes this dangerous appropriation and neutralisation even more unsettling for me is that many of these reels appear to use the audio from an old recording of Irrfan Khan reciting the poem at the Jaipur Literature Festival 2014. The video had gone viral in the aftermath of the 2020 Hathras gang rape and murder—the caste-based rape and murder of a Valmiki woman by Thakur men in Hathras.
