Earlier this month, Assamese singer and composer Zubeen Garg — who also achieved national recognition as a Bollywood playback artist — died in Singapore during a scuba-diving outing. The news reached Guwahati within hours; when his body returned, tens of thousands filled streets and stadiums, state honours were conferred, and his fans urged that one of his own songs be played as his requiem. The farewell was recorded by the Limca Book of Records as the fourth-largest public gathering in the world. The scale of that public grief quickly made clear that this was not only the loss of a musician but of a civic voice woven into the state’s cultural life.

Born Zubeen Borthakur in 1972, raised in a household where poetry and music were commonplace, he released his first Assamese album, 'Anamika', in 1992. Over three decades he was prolific — recording in many tongues; moving between folk idioms and pop, film and protest. That arc with small-town beginnings, a flirtation with Mumbai’s film circuits, and an emphatic return to regional music-making — explains part of his gravity: he was both local son and interlocutor with the national stage.

But to understand why Assam’s grief felt like something more than celebrity worship, we must look past the obvious Bollywood footnote. Zubeen’s practice was a sustained act of cultural translation: he blended Bihu, Kamrupi, and Goalpariya cadences with contemporary arrangements; he sang in tribal languages and dialects that rarely find microphones on mainstream stages; he partnered traditional motifs with electric textures so that a younger generation could hear its own rhythms as modern and consequential. Songs such as the plaintive 'Mayabini Ratir Bukut' became, for many, not merely hits but private anthems; soundtracks that threaded through the ordinary rituals of life.

He often said, “I am Assam,” and his life was a daily enactment of it. In his songs, the river’s edge, the cadence of a village conversation, the breath of Bihu mornings emerge not as nostalgic pastiche but as something lived and reworked. His pan-Assam appeal — from Barak Valley to the hills — was anchored by the fact that he sang of folk motifs, and everyday anxieties alike; he never allowed folk to stay quaint or marginalised. For the Assamese diaspora too, hearing his voice meant returning home, no matter how far they’d travelled. In resisting the flattening demands of mainstream fame, he made Assam’s cultural texture legible, and possible to care about, in the face of pressures that often pushed regional identity to the margins.

Equally important was the role he played as a public conscience. Zubeen repeatedly marshalled his fame for causes. During the COVID-19 Pandemic he offered his two-storey Guwahati home and asked that it be converted into a care centre. Through his Kalaguru Artiste Foundation he raised and distributed resources during floods and other emergencies. Perhaps most visibly, he emerged as a prominent non-political voice opposed to the Citizenship Amendment Act, using concerts and speeches to mobilise sentiment and articulate a defense of Assam’s linguistic and cultural ecosystems. That combination — musical stewardship plus civic intervention — turned him into something like a secular patron for a populace that often feels politically unmoored.

Despite all of this, his relationship with Assam was not uncomplicated. Zubeen courted controversies that exposed the tensions at the heart of cultural belonging: when he sang Hindi numbers at Bihu functions he was sometimes reproached or even stopped mid-performance; local authorities and satra committees at times disputed his place on sacred stages. Those frictions went beyond language; they were theatrical reminders that regional identity is always negotiated — and that Zubeen presented himself as a boundary-walker, insisting that belonging could be messy and argumentative.

If we take stock, his popularity cannot be reduced to charisma or a single song (Like 'Ya Ali' featured in the 2006 film 'Gangster'). It is the product of a career that refused the easy hierarchies of Indian music-culture. He treated Assamese idioms as materials worthy of ambitious reinvention; he refused to abandon political speech for polish; he made generosity part of his public brand. For many in Assam, that mattered because it made representation feel reciprocal. Zubeen sang both of and with Assam — its faults, pride, and unease. For a people accustomed to cultural invisibility in national narratives, that felt like recognition.

The massive show of love and solidarity at Zubeen Garg’s funeral in Guwahati underscored just how deeply he was woven into Assam’s social fabric. Yet beyond the extraordinary spectacle of public mourning lies a quieter, more enduring story: over decades, Zubeen transformed from a mercurial performer into a civic figurehead; a repository of language, memory, and dissent. Assam’s grief, in that sense, is not only about losing a beloved musician; it is also an acknowledgement of the cultural dignity he laboured to protect — a dignity that must be carried forward.

Listen to his music below:

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