Zubeen represented not perfection, but possibility

THE death of Zubeen Garg marks more than the end of a prodigious career. It reveals the deep anxieties and contradictions of a society caught between cultural intimacy and capitalist consumption. Few figures in recent Indian popular culture have embodied this tension so completely as the iconic Zubeen has. To understand Zubeen Garg is to understand the social imagination of contemporary Assam, its longing for rootedness, its unease with modernity and search for continuity after the voice of Dr Bhupen Hazarika fell silent.

In the decades following Bhupen Hazarika's passing, Assam experienced a quiet cultural vacuum, with the artiste who could both mirror and move the masses, missing. Spontaneous and profoundly instinctive, Zubeen entered this very space, to reign the contemporary music scene and the hearts of millions in Assam. In doing so, the singer belonged not to the concert hall but to the everyday soundscape of Assam.

Zubeen's widely popular songs carried the pulse of a people negotiating rapid change in the post-liberalisation Assam: the erosion of rural worlds, rise of capitalism, unsteady expansion of urban life and growing movements of people from rural to emerging urban spaces, besides the fast-spreading tentacles of consumerism. In such a social scenario, his voice travelled from tea gardens to university canteens, from marriage halls to protest gatherings, from the annual Bihu manchas (public stages set up during Rongali Bihu) to night coaches plying on the highways, knitting together an imagined community of listeners.

Zubeen's popularity cannot be understood without situating it within Assam's socio-political landscape. The region has long been marked by tensions over issues of identity, resulting in unrest, from the anti-foreigner movement of the late 70s and 80s, followed by militancy, creating fractures within the social fabric. While cultural icons like Hazarika mediated politics through explicit moral and ideological appeals, Zubeen's intervention was more instinctive and emotional. His politics was not declared through slogans but through his recognition of Assamese identity as porous and dynamic rather than fixed and exclusionary. In a state still grappling with questions of belonging, migration, cultural hegemony and linguistic assertion, Zubeen's music offered a unifying space where identity was felt rather than preached.

A song like ‘Mayabini’ exemplifies this truth. At one level, ‘Mayabini’ is a mellifluous love song, mysterious and melancholic, yet it also speaks of a collective loss and longing that resonates beyond romance. Its melody, rooted in Assamese folk idioms, is layered with contemporary instrumentation made possible through Zubeen's understanding of orchestration, suggesting a dialogue between tradition and modernity. That tension is what defined Assamese society in the 2000s, a generation caught between rural nostalgia and urban aspiration. ‘Mayabini’ became popular not merely because it was soul-stirring, but because it expressed an emotional situation shared by listeners who were entering a new economy, yet yearning for the warmth of an older world. His songs — Amanikha Xare Ase and Xunare Xojua Poja — extend this theme of emotional modernity, articulating loneliness, uncertainty and desire within a society undergoing rapid existential tests.

Unlike the grand collectivist optimism of Bhupen Hazarika's era, Zubeen's songs were intimate and self-reflective, mirroring the inward turn of a generation raised amidst consumer culture and social fragmentation. Yet, paradoxically, these songs also created moments of mass identification as people sang them in gatherings, weddings and rallies. This coexistence of the private and the collective made Zubeen a singular figure in Assamese public life.

What also made Zubeen distinct was his resistance to containment. He sang in multiple languages, composed for films and experimented with genres, from rock and folk to spiritual. The fluidity of experimentation with his music was not merely an aesthetic choice; it also reflected the shifting social terrain of Assam, a society exposed to global media flows across the 90s and the decade to follow, but anchored in strong community memory as the singer became a cultural mediator between these worlds, his art a site where nostalgia met aspiration, where the rhythms of Bihu and the idioms of western music could conveniently coexist.

Yet, Zubeen's very openness made him acutely vulnerable. As cultural consumerism deepened, the market's appetite for the authentic began to devour authenticity itself. Artistes were branded and circulated as consumable commodities. The more popular they became, the more their spontaneity was sacrificed to visibility.

Zubeen, whose creativity was instinctive rather than strategic, found himself at the crossroads of this transition. He was trapped between his identity as an artiste and the demands of a media economy that thrives on performance rather than creativity. That the artiste was aware of it is evident from his interview by novelist Rita Choudhary for her podcast. Zubeen shared hints about being exploited by a section. In doing so, one cannot help but notice a certain awkwardness in the singer's expression: that of helplessness.

In a world driven by algorithmic curation, Zubeen's music retained the capacity to forge genuine collectivity. He did what platforms only simulate: evoke shared emotion. His songs travelled not through data but through lived experience, through the oral and affective circuits that sustain regional cultures, as in folk traditions. After the artiste's tragic death, when people say "Zubeen united Assam", it is the recognition of a rare phenomenon in contemporary popular culture, the re-emergence of community through sound.

But the celebration of Zubeen also exposed Assam's uneasy relationship with fame and modernity. In a society historically suspicious of individualism, his flamboyant persona, alternately tender and defiant, tested the limits of what it meant to be a public figure. He was both idolised and admonished, loved for his candour and judged for his excesses. In this ambivalence lies the deeper sociological reading of his popularity: Zubeen represented not perfection, but possibility. He became the ordinary man's fantasy of freedom in a conformist world.

His life exemplifies how cultural icons emerge when institutions falter. Zubeen gave voice to a generation that no longer believed in grand narratives yet yearned for belonging. His art was not the anthem of a movement but the soundtrack of a mood, fragmented, plural and deeply human.

His death, then, is not only the loss of a beloved artiste but a mirror to our times. It forces us to confront the slow violence of a market that commodifies creativity and hollows out the very souls it celebrates.

And yet, his voice refuses erasure. It lingers in tea gardens, in dim hostel rooms and in the mechanical rhythm of city nights, a reminder that authenticity can still survive noise. Zubeen's songs continue to hold together what liberalisation and political forces fragmented: community, tenderness and the stubborn dignity of emotion. His art endures as a moral challenge to the times, to a culture that celebrates performance but forgets feeling.

If Hazarika was the conscience of a collective dream, Zubeen was the heartbeat of its disillusionment. His death closes an era, but his echo will remain the last cry of a people still searching for meaning in the ruins of modernity.

Maulee Senapati is a Professor at DLCS University of Performing & Visual Arts, Rohtak.