It is difficult to imagine Assam without the voice of Zubeen Garg. I started knowing him as Jubin, then he became Jubeen and now Zubeen. For more than three decades, his songs echoed across our valleys, our tea gardens, our small towns, our festivals, our heartbreaks, and our triumphs. And yet, today, as news of his death reaches us, there is a strange silence that seems to have descended. It is the kind of silence one feels when a wild river, after centuries of flow, suddenly retreats into the earth.
For me, Zubeen was not just an artist on stage or on screen, he was a companion of growing up. I was hardly ten years old when my brother, during one of our winter break journeys to Jorhat, brought home a cassette in 1992.
On its cover was a man with long hair, standing apart from the usual Assamese musical figures of that time. The title said Anamika. Alongside Kavita Krishnamurthy, this man, Zubeen Garg, was to change forever the way we imagined Assamese music. From that day on, I began to wait, year after year, for his next cassette release.
This was before the advent of regional satellite television in Assam, which means before 2006. Until then, Zubeen was accessible only through cassettes, tape recorders, stage functions, and those rare one or two FM programmes that played Assamese songs. It was a ritual for many of us, buying his latest cassette, sitting with friends, and listening to each track with a seriousness that was almost scholarly.
We would discuss his lyrics line by line, decode them, internalise them, and allow them to become part of our language. Through him, we not only enjoyed music—we learnt Assamese poetic expression. He had a way of teaching us to think in beauty.
The arrival of satellite television changed everything. Suddenly, Zubeen was not only a voice but also a face, a personality. He appeared in interviews, in trivia shows, in advertisements, and in soaps. As the Assamese entertainment industry began to take a recognizable shape, Zubeen too found himself shaped by it, yet never fully confined by its boundaries. He was too wild for that, too restless, too unwilling to be tamed by form or formula. He was Monjai, that famous line of his which still electrifies the air whenever someone invokes it. He embodied a spirit that refused to be held down.
But his music meant more than entertainment; it was also respite. During the painful decades of the ULFA movement, insurgency, and army operations, when fear and uncertainty gripped our society, Zubeen gave us a way to breathe. His songs were like secret lanterns, carried quietly into the night, offering warmth against the cold winds of violence and despair. For many families, for many young people, his music was not just sound, it was survival.
Friends who called me today reminded me of those evenings when we would gather around a tape recorder, the clunky buttons clicking as the cassette turned, waiting for his voice to begin. We would sing along, stumble over words, and then pause to argue about what a line truly meant. Those discussions were as intense as any classroom lecture because Zubeen’s lyrics demanded attention. They were layered, poetic, mischievous, and tender. They shaped a generation’s vocabulary of love, longing, protest, and hope.
And yet, as with all wild spirits, there came a time when his path shifted. Somewhere down the years, when he stopped writing as much of his own work and leaned on less poetic lyrics, I felt my bond with his newer numbers weaken. I remained, however, a lifelong devotee of his earlier songs, the ones that taught us to look at the world differently, to pause before beauty, to understand that music is not just sound but also thought.
What made Zubeen unforgettable was not perfection. It was his refusal to settle, his constant restlessness, his ability to live on the edge. He was as much a rebel as he was a romantic. His concerts were unpredictable, sometimes chaotic, but always alive. His public life, too, was filled with contradictions, moments of brilliance, controversies, struggles, and triumphs. But that was Zubeen: never rehearsed, never packaged, never artificial. He carried his wilderness into everything he did.
Assam, in many ways, grew with him. From cassettes to satellite TV to YouTube and digital platforms, Zubeen’s journey mirrors our own transition as a people negotiating tradition and modernity. And yet, through every shift, one thing remained unchanged: the sheer energy he brought into our lives. Whether it was Anamika, or Pakhi, or Mayabini, or his Bollywood ventures like Ya Ali, Zubeen knew how to cross boundaries while remaining rooted in his soil.
Today, when I think of his absence, what aches most is not just the loss of a singer but the loss of a certain kind of courage. In times when we needed escape, he gave us refuge. In times when we needed defiance, he gave us rebellion. In times when we needed joy, he gave us abandon. Zubeen was not just an artist, he was a condition of being Assamese.
As I write this, I cannot help but return to that first cassette in 1992, its fragile tape holding within it an entire universe that would go on to define my adolescence. I can still see the long-haired man on the cover, defiant, promising something new. And he kept that promise, for all of us, for so long.
May his soul continue to sing in the wild, unfettered and free. For his wilderness was such that it could not be tamed by anyone—not by fame, not by industry, not by society, not even by the burdens of time. Zubeen Garg was, and will remain, Assam’s eternal wild.
Also Read: For many non-Assamese like me, Zubeen Garg was our portal into Assamese music