Assam after Zubeen Garg, the rebel-artist who became a region’s conscience

Zubeen Garg famously recalled his arrival in this city from the Upper Assam town of Jorhat in the 1990s as “the boy on a bicycle with a keyboard strapped to his back”. In three decades, that new kid on the block who had donned psychedelic clothes and wore a rakish smile on his impossibly handsome face grew from a singer to an iconic rockstar. Each of these avatars was eagerly embraced by a people weary from long years of existential unease as Assam stepped into an uncertain future.

And Zubeen Garg became the new face of Assam, asserting regionalism with a boldness unknown in the past. His compositions, in every language of northeast India, captured the aspirations of the people. Borrowing motifs from these familiar lands — the ethnicities, tribes, folkways and ecology — he simultaneously adopted the cosmopolitan language of the nation, effortlessly weaving homegrown idioms into a sophisticated mix of genres, lingos and styles — always backed by fierce Assamese pride.

A man who looked beyond race, religion or god, Zubeen Garg wrote his songs in the language of love for the common man. He gradually morphed into a cultural giant that the powerful in Assam’s restive political environment hesitated to take on. A passionate supporter of a range of causes, from education to animal rescue, from the environment to citizenship for refugees and migrants, Zubeen Garg grew larger than himself.

Though he still swaggered on to the stage and dared to defy the social apparatuses, the restlessness of his youth had tempered into a philosophical “coolness” as he spoke to Gen Z with his songs. Unfazed by the many challenges he had faced, Zubeen rose to occupy a space free from judgment and prejudice, bias or bigotry. His was the liberty of the unaffiliated in a time of cronyism and trusteeship, and his music allowed him that freedom of indifference to Assam’s burgeoning class of wealth and privilege.

When he stormed annually onto the Bihutolis (pandals), he harked back to the old Assamese way, celebrating the charm of small towns and agrarian life, from where his romantic idealism had issued. Going against the grain of militarisation sweeping the region, Zubeen’s irreverent voice stole into the new era, ushering a fresh wave of confidence into the 1990s, with thousands of songs that kept alive the native magic, hope, and love and longing in the decades after.

A rebel-artist, Zubeen was the very embodiment of the free spirit. He was as much a pin-up icon as the friendly neighbour across the street, an ally to paupers and prodigals, a modern-day Robin Hood whose music earned money that he then doled out to the needy. Zubeen’s tireless championing of the underdog easily made him everyman’s soul — Jonotar pranor Zubeen.

His sudden death on a distant shore whipped up a mass hysteria and crippling grief. As Zubeen’s Assam suddenly felt orphaned, “Mayabini”, the 2000s song he chose to be remembered by, became a haunting refrain, a totem of collective grief and mourning.

How does a people grieve for its loveliest child? And what name do we give to that emotion welling up like an ancient ache, a thousand griefs rising as one, the knowledge that even as his songs beat in our pulse, his voice has been stilled? And how do we explain that his music reverberates in the hills and plains of our land, in campuses and parks, shining like dew in the quiet corners of our loneliness and streaming like sunshine into our veins? That it invades even our sleep with greater meaning and truth than ever before? As I write this, we witness the moment of the man meeting eternity as flames engulf his body, reminding us that “the communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living”.

The writer is an academic, and currently Professor and Head, Department of English at Cotton University, Guwahati