The death of Zubeen Garg has plunged Assam into a grief that feels both personal and collective, a sorrow that seems to have folded the state into silence. Few artists in India’s musical landscape straddled the dual worlds of popular Hindi cinema and deep regional pride as seamlessly as he did. His national breakthrough, ‘Ya Ali’ from Anurag Basu’s ‘Gangster’, became a generational anthem in the mid-2000s, but for Assam and the Northeast, he was never just a playback singer; he was the voice of identity, resistance, and belonging. Over a career spanning more than three decades, he sang over 40,000 songs in 40 languages and dialects, embodying a polyglot spirit that both celebrated Assamese traditions and carried them to a national and global stage. His art was not confined to melody alone—it was a cultural assertion. For millions in Assam, Zubeen was the closest equivalent to an icon who could merge the local and the universal, who could stand on the stage of Guwahati’s Bihu grounds and command the same reverence as he did in Bollywood studios. It is this duality, this ability to belong wholly to Assam while reaching far beyond it, that explains why his sudden passing has felt like the tearing of the social fabric.
The days following his death revealed how deeply Zubeen’s music had seeped into everyday lives. Guwahati was paralysed, not by administrative diktat but by the collective weight of grief. The city observed what many called a “Black Day”: shops closed, services shut down, and an eerie stillness enveloped commercial hubs. From the airport to Kahilipara, thousands lined the streets to pay their last respects. People wept openly, showered flowers, and lit incense sticks outside shuttered stores. In balconies, on terraces, and even on dividers, men, women, and children stood for hours, embodying a rare civic unanimity that was neither orchestrated nor rehearsed. Yet, this outpouring of grief also raised troubling questions. Civilian groups reportedly forced businesses to close, inconveniencing daily-wage earners and even disrupting food and medicine deliveries. For a city still recovering from the pandemic’s economic wounds, such enforced shutdowns exposed the tension between mourning as a voluntary act of solidarity and the dangers of emotional coercion. But this paradox only underlines the intensity of loss: Zubeen’s death was not just the silencing of a voice; it was the interruption of a way of life, one so interwoven with his songs that people could not imagine going about routine business without first honouring him.
What Assam has lost in Zubeen Garg cannot be measured in charts or sales, nor in awards or public ceremonies. It is a more intimate rupture. He was not simply a singer who climbed charts with “Ya Ali” or filled stadiums with fans waving gamosas embroidered with “ZG Forever.” He was a living metaphor for Assam’s cultural resilience, a reminder that the state could gift something to the world without losing its soul. His jeep became a symbol as much as his music—open, accessible, embodying the man who was as comfortable at a wedding in a small town as he was on an international stage. The grief in Assam is not just for an artist but for an idea: that of a bridge between tradition and modernity, between regional pride and cosmopolitan belonging. It is telling that fans sang ‘Mayabini’ during his funeral processions, the very song he wished to be remembered by—an elegy that has now become a collective anthem of loss. For Assam, there will always be another singer, another voice, but there will not be another Zubeen. His memorial, wherever it is built, will not just mark the passing of an artist but will stand as a reminder of what it means when music is not entertainment alone, but identity, memory, and belonging.