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Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

Valmiki’s Thakur ka Kuan isn’t a background score for your Thakur Pride Reel

To distort a poem into something that contradicts its very foundation is not trendy, cool, or something to be proud of. It is a refusal to confront the realities it comes from.

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........

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