Zubeen Garg (1972-2025) was Assam’s true heartthrob; his persona as a rebel was almost as famous as his music, which threaded joy, grief, defiance, love and longing into the lives of millions
Hours before Zubeen Garg died in Singapore at the age of 52, he was seen singing Tears in Heaven, Eric Clapton’s ballad of mourning, of wondering if there’s a way through grief. In 1991, Clapton’s four-year-old son, Conor, died in a horrific accident; he fell from the 53rd floor of a New York apartment building. The loss had devastated Clapton, who had already lived through years of turbulence due to addiction, broken relationships, and the deaths of friends. Out of this grief came Tears in Heaven, co-written with songwriter Will Jennings, the man behind other chart-toppers like Up Where We Belong and My Heart Will Go On.
The song is framed as a conversation between Clapton and his lost son; he wonders if they will recognise each other in the afterlife: “Would it be the same if I saw you in heaven?” It’s also a meditation on survival: how to keep living with unbearable sorrow. The lyrics are stripped-down, and painfully direct, avoiding metaphor or poetic flourish. Watching the viral video of Zubeen singing Tears in Heaven left me wondering if he sang Clapton’s afterlife question as a prelude to his own departure. It was as if Clapton’s private loss had been mapped onto Zubeen’s public exit. As if a song had stretched across time, folding two griefs into one.
As Assam, and the nation, mourns the passing of an icon, that last rendition is like a door that swung briefly open, letting in both music and mortality, leaving behind a silence that’s louder than any song. A silence that testifies to what it means to lose a voice that had, for decades, filled the days of his listeners with sheer joy. It’s this silence that seems to have subsumed the rhythms of daily life, from Golaghat and Guwahati, Biswanath and Barpeta, Jorhat and Kokrajhar to Nalbari and Nagaon.
In Biswanath, business establishments shut their doors for 24 hours as thousands joined a student-led procession, carrying Zubeen’s photograph and chanting, “Zubeen da amar houk” (May Zubeen da live forever). In Golaghat, people gathered in marketplaces and fields, singing his songs through tears. In Guwahati, memorials sprang up across localities — Latasil, Ganeshguri, Six Mile — as students and teachers from institutions like B. Borooah College organised spontaneous vigils. Cultural organisations such as the Axom Xahitya Xabha lowered their flags, while the All Assam Students’ Union announced a seven-day (against the state’s three-day) mourning period, treating Zubeen’s passing almost like a national bereavement.
Beyond thresholds
Born Zubeen Borthakur in Tura, Meghalaya, in 1972, and raised in Jorhat, Zubeen had music in his blood; he arrived at it as if were a birthright. His late mother, Ily Borthakur, was a classical dancer and singer. His father, Mohini Mohan Borthakur (85), a retired bureaucrat and poet, has been suffering from Alzheimer’s. They named him after the conductor Zubin Mehta, who was already an international figure by the 1970s, having made his name in the world of Western classical music. By the time Zubeen was three, he was already singing; he was composing when he was still in school. He studied tabla for more than a decade, absorbed Assamese folk traditions, and taught himself guitar and harmonium.
By his teens, he was recording jingles, strumming guitars, and borrowing voices — folk, bhajan, pop — until he found one that felt like his own. He never really settled on one. Zubeen would go on to master more than a dozen instruments, though he seemed never to care for the term “multi-instrumentalist.” For Zubeen, instruments were like friends, each with a different timbre, each ready to join him in his restlessness.
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The early 1990s saw Zubeen cut his first few Assamese albums, but it was Anamika (1992) and Pakhi (2002) that made him a household name in Assam. Pakhi — a diary of memory, written in the voice of a restless heart that insists on its own freedom — in particular became a hit that would be loved by millions. The refrain, “Pakhi, pakhi, ei mon / Pakhi loga mor mon” (Bird, bird, my heart feels like a bird) becomes the mantra for a longing for flight from the ordinary days.
The lines that follow are steeped in the memories of childhood: father’s sternness, mother’s gentleness, the half-failures of school, the joys of returning home to play until exhaustion. It is a song of contrasts, mixing scoldings with lullabies, innocence with the ache of solitude, everyday thresholds with the open sky. What gives the song its poignancy is its honesty: it acknowledges the bruises and the strictures of growing up, but still insists on flight, on the possibility of escape through song, through memory, through art. In Pakhi, the bird is not only an image of freedom, but also an emblem of how music itself carries one beyond thresholds, toward a sky that remains unclaimed.
Through the 1980s and ’90s, Assam had lived under the shadow of insurgency and counterinsurgency. Public life was marked by curfews, checkpoints, and a sense of narrowing horizons. The song gave Assam a way to feel itself again. The album’s emotional vocabulary was expansive. Besides songs of longing, there were numbers that borrowed from Assamese folk cadences, and tracks that flirted with Western instrumentation. Zubeen’s voice stretched across them all, sometimes high-pitched, sometimes rough-edged and defiant. In a state where music had always been tied to ritual — Bihu, Naam-kirtan, wedding songs — here was a record that sounded modern without disowning its roots.
A rebel with several causes
By the 2000s, Zubeen had crossed into Bollywood. His song, Ya Ali, for Anurag Basu’s Gangster (2006), carried his voice beyond Assam to a national and international audience. Composed by Pritam with lyrics by Sayeed Quadri, it was a devotional-tinged love track that fused Sufi undertones with Bollywood’s pop sensibilities.
Zubeen’s soaring vocals became the soul of the track, giving it an intensity that helped the film’s dark love story find emotional depth. The song topped music charts across India, was widely played on radio and television, and won Zubeen the Global Indian Film Award (GIFA) for Best Playback Singer. For many listeners outside Assam, Ya Ali was their first encounter with his voice. Even years later, it remains his most recognisable Hindi song.
But Zubeen never seemed dazzled by national recognition and would return to Assam and record another folk-inflected track as if the glitz and glamour of Mumbai were just a layover. He composed for films in Assamese, Bengali, and Hindi, acted in over a dozen movies, directed one, and produced several. He would swing from devotional albums to rock performances to political anthems. His concerts often ran past midnight, with the singer sweating through endless encores while fans shouted requests. He was notorious for collapsing the distance between stage and street, sometimes literally climbing down to sing shoulder-to-shoulder with his audience.
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Over the years, his persona as a rebel became almost as famous as his music. He never hid his disdain for ritual. At concerts, he would mock Brahminical codes, and on one occasion, if I recall correctly, he publicly snapped the sacred thread, a deliberate rejection of the caste identity he was born into. For many in Assam’s deeply traditional society, this was an act of defiance bordering on sacrilege. For his supporters, it was consistent with the irreligious streak he had long claimed, a refusal to bow before inherited hierarchies.
Politics, too, drew him into controversy. He spoke often and bluntly, whether about corruption in public life or about Assamese identity in the face of national neglect. During the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) protests of 2019-20, Zubeen was one of the loudest cultural voices against the law. He performed at protest sites, dedicated songs to the movement, and became, for a brief moment, its unofficial mascot. He saw CAA as an assault on Assam’s fragile balance of community and belonging. His presence energised the protests, but it also put him at odds with political powers.
Zubeen Garg’s catalogue of songs runs into over 38,000 in Assamese, Bengali, Hindi, and even Sanskrit.
In 2017, he was briefly arrested for performing late into the night, violating Guwahati’s noise regulations. He treated the episode with characteristic irreverence, telling reporters he would rather be jailed than silenced. The same restlessness that drove him to record over 38,000 songs also made him impatient with rules, institutions, and even audiences who tried to pin him down. But this never eroded his popularity in Assam. If anything, it made him larger. He was not an idol to be admired from afar, but a volatile, flesh-and-blood figure who spoke in the same idioms as his listeners, who could falter publicly and return the next day with another song.
His music: A guides through his absence
Zubeen’s catalogue runs into thousands — Assamese, Bengali, Hindi, even devotional Sanskrit. But a handful of songs have become almost folkloric. Mayabini Ratir Bukut (In the Enchanted Night’s Embrace), a love song, still makes its way into Assamese homes. It’s a song in which intimacy is woven with the imagery of Nature and time. It depicts love as something that seeps into the silences of life: the morning dew on a withered heart, the autumn flower that carries unspoken words, the storm that passes with a soul across ages.
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It is a song of yearning, in which the beloved appears like a secret vision in the night and becomes the imagined refuge where loneliness may finally end: Tumi je mor shukhan monot, niyorre chenchha topal (you are the cluster of dew-drenched drops falling on my withered heart)….Duchokule tumar chale, sopon athori dithok name (When your eyes glance at me, dreams come and slip away). This was a song he wanted his fans to sing after he left for the heavenly abode. This is a song that is being sung on the streets of Assam to keep his memory alive.
Zubeen’s life was never tidy, and he never pretended otherwise. He was quick-tempered, famously outspoken, sometimes reckless in his remarks. He picked fights with politicians, challenged orthodoxies, and alienated institutions that wanted to tame him. In 2019, he sparked outrage with comments about Brahminical traditions; in 2024, he questioned the divinity of Krishna in Majuli, inviting bans from religious bodies. However, behind the controversies was the same insistence that marked his music: a refusal to live in preordained roles. That he had a heart of gold, he revealed on several occasions. For instance, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, he offered his house in Guwahati to be converted into a care centre.
Perhaps the wound that shaped him as an artist most was private. His younger sister, Jonkey Borthakur, an actress and singer, died in a car crash in 2002. And he narrowly escaped death. The grief never really left him. He recorded Xixhu in her memory. Friends say he carried Jonkey’s absence like an invisible instrument that played in the background of everything he created.
Zubeen leaves behind his wife, Garima Saikia Garg, and a state whose mornings and monsoons will never sound quite the same again. Statues may be built, bridges named after him, honorary degrees conferred, but the true memorial is more tangible: a tea vendor in Jorhat softly humming a line from Pakhi while pouring milk into boiling tea; a crowd in Guwahati chanting his protest songs as if each word were a heartbeat; a solitary listener in Mumbai pressing play on Ya Ali at midnight, letting the melody drift through the apartment.
Zubeen’s voice — restless, insistent, alive — refuses to leave. It lingers in the corners of memory, in the pauses between raindrops, in the spaces where longing and joy collide. The body is gone, but the music persists, echoing endlessly, haunting and inexhaustible. Watching him croon Tears in Heaven, I felt as if he was holding our hearts in his hand, trying to tell us that grief, love, and memory are all tangled together, like smoke rising from a fire you can’t quite put out. The best way to mourn him, therefore, is to listen to his song, to let his music guide us through his absence.
