Siddharth Roy (siddharth001.roy@gmail.com)
A year after Zubeen Garg’s death, Assam is confronting a peculiar form of grief: the disappearance of a voice that had become part of the region’s cultural vocabulary without disappearing from its everyday life. His songs continue to be heard in cars, homes, campuses, tea shops and public gatherings. Yet the deeper question on his first death anniversary is not simply why Assam misses Zubeen da. It is what his extraordinary cultural reach reveals about language, identity, popular memory and the place of regional artistes in contemporary India.
Zubeen da’s professional career began in 1992 with the album Anamika and extended over more than three decades. His national breakthrough came with “Ya Ali” in the 2006 Hindi film Gangster. But to measure Zubeen da by his Bollywood success would be to misunderstand the source of his cultural significance. His most consequential work was done in Assamese.
Zubeen da’s importance lay in his ability to make regional identity contemporary. He did not present Assamese culture as something that needed to be protected from modern influences. Instead, he absorbed new sounds, technologies and popular forms and made them speak in the language of home. That was a subtle but important cultural act. At a time when cultural aspiration in smaller linguistic communities can sometimes be accompanied by anxiety about assimilation, Zubeen da’s demonstrated that a regional language could be modern, commercially successful, emotionally intimate and culturally confident at the same time.
This is why the word “Star” seems insufficient when applied to him. A star has an audience; Zubeen da acquired something closer to a collective memory. His songs became attached to particular stages of life. For one listener, a song may recall a college romance; for another, a Bihu celebration, a journey away from home or a childhood spent listening to music on the radio. Such associations cannot be manufactured by publicity. They accumulate slowly, through repetition and personal experience, until an artiste’s work becomes inseparable from the biography of a community.
The extraordinary public mourning after his death offered evidence of this cultural intimacy. When his remains reached Guwahati, the 25-km journey from the airport to his home took about five hours because of the crowds. Shops and establishments closed across the state, while people gathered in neighbourhoods to sing and mourn. At his cremation on September 23, thousands sang Mayabini Ratir Bukut, a song he had once said he wished the people of Assam would sing after his death.
That phenomenon deserves analytical attention. Popular culture is often treated as entertainment, separate from the serious work of politics, economics or social institutions. But artistes can perform a form of cultural integration that formal institutions cannot easily reproduce. Zubeen Garg’s music crossed class, geography and generations. It provided a shared emotional vocabulary in a State marked by considerable linguistic, ethnic and regional diversity. His appeal was not uniform in every community, and no artist can represent an entire society. Yet the breadth of the mourning demonstrated that his cultural footprint was unusually wide.
His legacy also raises a difficult question about the relationship between regional culture and the Indian mainstream. India’s cultural diversity is frequently celebrated as an abstraction. Zubeen da offered a more practical model: one can enter the national cultural marketplace without abandoning the language and sensibility of one’s home. “Ya Ali” made his voice familiar to millions outside Assam, but his enduring place in Assamese life came from the fact that national visibility did not replace regional belonging.
That lesson is particularly important in the digital age. Streaming platforms and social media have democratised access to audiences, but they have also intensified competition for attention. Algorithms can make music from anywhere instantly accessible, yet visibility remains concentrated around commercially dominant languages and markets. Regional music can therefore be simultaneously more accessible and more vulnerable. Zubeen da’s legacy should prompt Assam to think beyond memorials towards institutions: systematic preservation of recordings, digitisation of archives, music education, grants for young artists, regional production facilities and platforms that allow experimentation in Assamese and other Northeastern languages.
There is also a danger in turning Zubeen da into an untouchable icon. His significance was precisely that he was not a museum object. He was restless, experimental and unconventional. Preserving his legacy should therefore mean preserving the freedom to create, disagree, innovate and cross boundaries. A young musician imitating Zubeen da endlessly would preserve his image but not his spirit. The better tribute would be to create conditions in which artistes can develop voices as distinctive as his.
The circumstances of his death have added another layer to Assam’s grief. Singapore authorities initially recorded drowning as the cause of death, while Singapore police said their preliminary investigation did not suspect foul play. In Assam, however, a separate investigation continued, and in May 2026 a special fast-track court framed charges against seven accused, including murder charges against four. Zubeen da’s legacy should not become permanently trapped inside the circumstances of his death. The unanswered questions deserve a lawful answer, but his life deserves a larger remembrance.
Perhaps the most revealing aspect of his first death anniversary is the way absence has changed. In the first days after his death, Assam confronted shock. A year later, it confronts permanence.
The most fitting memorial to him may consequently be neither a statue nor a ceremony. It may be an Assam confident enough to let its languages flourish, its young artists experiment and its cultural memory remain alive.
The man is gone. The voice remains. The responsibility now is to ensure that the culture which gave that voice meaning continues to sing.