Do some artistes carry a death wish?

Shantanu Thakur

(thakur.santanu@gmail.com)

For a month now, the atmosphere has been so surcharged that it’s almost impossible to think of anything else but Zubeen Garg. Everything else, like, say, the tariff war, Gaza, Pakistan, etc., has all taken a back seat, at least in our state. Many people of my generation in the state have woken up to the full, overpowering magic of his songs only after he was no more. I had surely heard and loved some of his hits earlier also, but the full gamut of his oeuvre, the scale and the range of his intensity, and the mind-boggling number of songs he had sung hit me in the face like a sudden storm only after he was gone. Honestly, I turned into a Zubeen Garg fan after he was no more in flesh and blood. And, I say this not as an apology, but as a tribute to his qualities as an artiste par excellence. If you go into semantics, Zubeen was both an artiste and an artist.

I have been following all the videos and audios that have cropped up in the aftermath of his death. There’s a full array of these available on the internet, covering his entire life, right from his childhood to the tragic moments of his death at sea. I have also paid fresh, newfound attention to the lyrics of the songs he had penned and sung, and in the process, I seem to have had some glimpses into his impulses and yearnings. One recurring thought though in my mind has been – did Zubeen carry a death wish? Or, for that matter, do all true artistes carry a hidden death wish?

In a poem – Andrea del Sarto – by Robert Browning, the perfection-seeking painter asks soulfully, “Ah! But a man’s reach should exceed his grasp. Or, what’s a heaven for?” The poem explores the ever-present tension in an artiste between the creative drive and the demands of the day-to-day mundane. There is always a tug-of-war between artistic ideals and pressures of domesticity. An artiste’s aspirations tend to go beyond what is immediately possible. A true creative artiste has an underlying compulsion to reach beyond his reach; this pursuit gives him meaning in life; it stops him from stagnation. As Tagore had said, it’s a “tireless striving stretching its arms towards perfection.” 

Many poets and singers have often written, spoken of, or imagined their own end. Dr Bhupen Hazarika has many numbers on the theme. In several of his songs, Zubeen Garg has also sung of a time when he will be no more. The true artiste in him seemed to be not content with what he had already achieved. In some interviews, he had also indicated that he was getting tired of singing. “Have sung enough,” he had said. “I am not a machine.” He wanted to go beyond limitations, and maybe that’s why he had diverted to other areas of artistic creativity like filmmaking, etc. If looked at closely, symptoms of discontentment can also be discerned earlier in his career. Some of his antics on stage, like climbing a pole, etc., need not necessarily be seen as the usual stunts of cult culture; they could as well have sprung from a deep-seated desire to break the mould, to tear apart the unseen nets that caged him in, to go beyond. The frustrations in the life of a true artiste cannot easily be fathomed by us lesser mortals. The stalwarts from classics – King Raam, Yudhishahira, and Arjuna – great warriors and noblemen all – had at some point or other in their lives experienced a sense of the futility of it all. Even after achieving cult star stature, artistes may be labouring under a sense of vacuum, to the extent that at times, they might even say, “To hell with life.” We fail to see their souls. On the surface, Zubeen definitely enjoyed his life, as we like to describe things. But there was always a searing anguish in his vocals and his lyrics, even in the pulsating rhythms he had introduced to Assamese modern music. And, when you listen to him doing the traditional Assamese devotionals, the classics and the folk, that’s when you get to see a totally different artiste in front of you. He had layers and layers to him and, like all true artists, was never at ease with everything within.

Those video clips from that absolutely avoidable water sport at sea keep haunting me ceaselessly. Apart from the callous neglect of all those around him at that moment when a little care and concern could have averted a tragedy, another thought keeps disturbing me nonetheless: that of the gifted artist jumping into the sea with no life jacket on. He seemed to be throwing a challenge, as if saying, “The life force in me is indomitable; I can take you on bare-bodied! If Santiago could do it, so can I!” An indomitable artiste facing the all-powerful elements at the horizon!

This is not a studied attempt at psychology, just the effort of a fan to understand the icon. In the remaining years of my life, I would try to celebrate his unstoppable creativity and understand the grammar behind his music and the indomitable spirit behind the façade. Death, be not proud …