Zubeen Garg Birth Anniversary: Love, Music And The Making Of A People’s Artist

As I write about the legendary cultural icon of Assam, Zubeen Garg, I am once again reminded of Maya Angelou’s timeless words, “I have learned that people will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel.” These words are not just reflections, but capture how deeply human connections and experiences shape our memory of a person. For the innumerable people of Assam, Zubeen Da embodied this collective truth and emotion. His voice was more than music; it was the pulse of Assam and the Northeast. It reminds us that love is not confined to private emotion but can serve as the foundation of solidarity, shaping a shared sense of identity and collective strength.

On the fateful day of September 19, 2025, Assam fell silent—it lost its voice and a part of its soul. Zubeen Da’s loss has left an inexplicable void in the people of Assam. He did not sing of great struggles or lofty notions of revolution; instead, he made the small, ordinary, everyday realities of life and existence visible and political. For the world, he was Zubeen Garg, but for us, he was and will always remain Zubeen Da.

Love, Solidarity, and Humanity in Song and Life

It is often said, and rightly so, that love is the foundation of everything; without it, even revolution seems impossible. Bell Hooks, a black feminist and civil rights activist, reminds us that love is a political force, a foundation for justice and collective healing. Yet, today we live in a world unsettled by political flux, where nations compete for power through division and domination; where the suffering of ordinary people has been normalised; and where politics increasingly fuels hatred, silences dissent, and legitimises “othering.” In such a climate, one is reminded of Zubeen Da’s song, “Politics nokoriba bondhu…Dubela duxaaj bhat khuti khuti khau” (Don’t play politics, friend! We scavenge for every grain of rice to eat), which lays bare the struggles of everyday survival, while demanding recognition and justice for all who long to live with dignity. 

Zubeen Da’s ideas of love, solidarity, humanity, and collective identity were deeply influenced by Dr Bhupen Hazarika, whose songs and music placed strong emphasis on solidarity, humanity, and universal brotherhood. In actuality, he carried forward Hazarika’s legacy, albeit during tumultuous political times. Zubeen Da embraced the message of empathy, resistance, and revolutionary fervour underlining Hazarika’s songs as a powerful tool to reframe and reimagine that philosophy for a new generation. Where Hazarika sang the dream of solidarity in a newly independent India, Zubeen Da gave voice to the same dream in fragmented, fast-shifting, and frequently alienating circumstances of our times.

Angela Davis, the Black civil rights activist and scholar, has long highlighted music as a universal connection with the power to bridge cultural and linguistic divides. For her, music is never just melody—it is at once aesthetic pleasure, shared struggle, and collective memory. Drawing on Black history and culture, she shows how music holds the capacity to connect, sustain the spirit, and nurture the soul. In her framing, blues and jazz carried the voices of the oppressed and transformed them into an enduring struggle for freedom. Zubeen Da’s vast body of work can be understood in this light. Even when his songs spoke of love, longing, hope, or loss, his music carried a profound sense of camaraderie and resonated with the everyday rhythms of life in Assam and the Northeast.

Zubeen and the Power of the Everyday

This powerful evocation of the “everyday” encompasses the most ordinary, yet deeply political aspects of life that feminist thinkers remind us are never separate from structures of power. The saying “the personal is political” was, for Zubeen Da, not an abstract slogan but a lived reality. His songs drew from the rhythms of daily struggles and hopes; there was a sense of injustice that was clearly felt, embodying what Raymond Williams called the “structures of feeling”—the shared, often unspoken, collective emotions that bind communities together. In doing so, Zubeen Da transformed the everyday into a site of both resistance and belonging, reminding us that love itself can be a rebellious force. This is why he connected so intimately with the masses and why he remains the ‘people’s artist.’ He sang, lived, and struggled out of love—love for people, for Assam, for the Northeast, and for music itself. His legacy rests not only in melody, but in the political practice of love as an expansive, collective, and transformative force. 

The political and the personal were inseparable in Zubeen Da’s life and art; every note he sang carried the imprint of this dialectic. His music was not only a reflection of his inner world but also an articulation of the collective aspirations and anxieties of his people. In the way he imagined and upheld the identity of his motherland, Zubeen Da blended personal choice with political consciousness. The song, “Mrityu Etia Hohoj” (Now death feels easier), which he performed at a cultural protest against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act in Guwahati in December 2019 to mourn those who lost their lives, was illustrative of how he turned private grief into a collective sentiment rooted in love as a public memory shared across time and space. Similarly, the song “Mayabini Raatir Bukut, Dekha Paalu Tumar Sobi” (In the heart of the magical night, I see your image), though not overtly political in its lyrics, almost turned into a collective anthem—embraced not only across Assam and the Northeast, but also nationally and globally to mourn his passing. This reflects how songs of love and longing can become powerful resources for building solidarity and strengthening collective identity across borders.

Cultural Belonging and the Socialist Spirit

His understanding of Assamese identity was never rigid, homogeneous, or exclusionary; it was expansive, dynamic, and constantly ‘in the making’—capable of withstanding turbulent political times. In this sense, his vision resonates with Stuart Hall’s idea of identity as “becoming, not being” and Frantz Fanon’s conception of culture as a living, dynamic expression of resistance. For Zubeen Da, identity was not a boundary that divided people but a bridge that connected generations, languages, and communities across class, caste, gender, creed, and religion. The multitude of people who came together to pay their last respects was itself a living testament to the very idea of the collective that he had envisioned and practised throughout his life. What stood there was not just a sea of people, but a sea of humanity.

This is why he stands larger than an individual artist. Zubeen embodied the collective cultural identity of Assam, rooted in love for his people, his land, and in solidarity that reached beyond borders. His staggering repertoire of over 38,000 songs, spanning more than 40 languages and diverse musical traditions, was not just a quantifiable marker of his achievements but carried the message to the global circles that music itself refuses boundaries and that art is inseparable from struggle.

His sporadic allusions to Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara and Assamese cultural icon and political activist Bishnu Prasad Rabha are not merely incidental. He often references socialist roots in his songs. His iconic song "Jontro" (machine), which illustrates how the grind culture of daily living reduces life to mechanical repetition, comes to mind with respect to his political stance. Karl Marx's idea of alienation is especially pertinent in this situation, since workers are estranged not only from the product of their labour but also from themselves and one another.

Henri Lefebvre contends that although capitalism permeates the mundane and daily parts of our lives, resistance also originates there. Zubeen Da exposed what is typically normalised by associating humans with machines. His song “Jontro” is nothing short of a “tactic”, as Michael De Certeau would describe. It is important to recognise that singing about grind culture is a "tactic" in and of itself that expresses agency and shared struggle while reclaiming voice and cultural space.  Similar to this, his symbolic renunciation of the sacred thread, openly and fearlessly challenging caste privilege, denouncing religion, asserting his freedom, and performing Hindi songs at Bihu concerts during the state’s height of insurgency can be seen as ordinary, yet significant subversive tactics of resisting and defying dominant hegemonic structures that are both exploitative and exclusionary of the powerless and the marginalised.

Singing In The Dark Times

For Assam and the Northeast as a whole, Zubeen Da's passing is viewed as the end of an era. Yet his songs are more than simply reminiscences—they are blueprints for the future. Particularly during the tumultuous political periods that caused Assamese citizens to experience alienating conditions and fractured identities, the politics that influenced his life's path and each note of his music were nothing short of radical. His voice served as a unifying element throughout communities, ethnicities, and generations. While celebrating the local, his music made Assamese identity (s) apparent to the world at large.

His vision of love, solidarity, freedom, humanity, and justice is a powerful reminder that even in the most trying conditions, we must pledge to uphold the values and principles he practised through his music. As Bertolt Brecht asks, "In the dark times, will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing about the dark times." His life and times invite us to rethink, reimagine, and reframe love as political, culture as resistance, and identity as collective becoming. In Zubeen Da’s own words, we must move on without turning back, just as his songs urge us now and then.

“Jodi jibonor rong bure lukabhaku khele,

Jodi axaar saakiti umiumi jole.

Tothapi bondhu aaguai jaba,

Pisole ghurina saba.”

(Even if life’s colours begin to fade and hide,

Even if the lamp of hope flickers unsteadily,

Still, my friend, we must move forward,

Never turning back to the past).

From Assam and based in New Delhi, Ashmita Sharma works at the intersection of labour rights, gender justice, and sustainability.