Bhupen Hazarika (1926-2011) gave Assam its modern voice; he sang of the Brahmaputra, tea gardens, peasants and the poor; his songs still teach India and the world lessons in justice, love, compassion and humanity
One winter morning in Assam’s Sadiya, as Bhupen Hazarika (1926-2011) was taking a bath, his mother went into labour with her tenth child. His father, half in panic and half in jest, shouted to the boy: “Bhupen, what shall I name this baby boy?” The young Bhupen, terrified of his father but never short of wit, replied, “Deuta (Father), call him full stop!” That boy would become the last of the ten siblings, but the first son, Bhupen himself, would remain the family’s true anchor.
Through poverty, hardship, and success, Bhupen (whose centenary celebrations commenced on September 8, his birthday), shouldered the responsibility of looking after all of them, educating them, finding them work, arranging marriages, and even supporting the next generation. The toll on his psyche was immense, but it also seeded in him a sense of duty, of belonging to something larger than himself, a responsibility he would later expand from family to state, from state to nation, and finally to the world.
His father introduced him early to Assam’s buzzing cultural life of the 1930s. This was a time of experiments in literature, theatre, and music; when Assamese nationalists and intellectuals were building new institutions out of the raw material of language and history. A tiny, educated, urban middle class was speaking confidently for its community.
It was also the decade when the first Assamese film, Jyotiprasad Agarwala’s Joymoti (1935), was made, and when music began to assimilate both cultural pride and political aspiration. Into this world of ferment arrived Bhupen, carrying an uncanny gift: a voice deep and sonorous, like the Brahmaputra River itself, and a mind attuned to politics, poetry, and people’s pain.
By the time he reached adolescence, Bhupen was already shaped by mentors who would leave indelible marks on him: besides Agarwala with his socialist leanings, there were Bishnu Rabha (1909-1969) with his Marxist ideals, and Lakshminath Bezbarua (1864-1938) with his literary fire.
The young Bhupen absorbed their lessons in language, left-liberal thought, and art as activism. He sang in Assamese with care and gravitas, and his meticulous pronunciation was so respected that even the most educated Assamese would turn to him to learn how to properly speak their own tongue. As a singer and an educator, he embedded identity and dignity into his people’s words.
Scholar, wanderer, fakir
Bhupen Hazarika’s path could have been very different. He completed his M.A. in political science from Banaras Hindu University, then went on to Columbia University in New York, earning a Ph.D. in mass communication. He could have stayed in America, joining academia or media, living the relatively comfortable life of an Ivy League scholar.
But the river inside him tugged him back. He returned to Assam, to poverty, and to the identity he called his truest: that of a jajabor (wanderer) — Ami ek jajabor is his most iconic self-portraits in song — a fakir, a wandering minstrel, a street singer who dreamt of freedom and carried it in his throat.
He joined the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) in the 1950s, an organisation where leftist politics and cultural activism went hand in hand. In Assam, Bhupen and fellow artists transformed IPTA into a mass movement, using theatre and song to reach farmers, workers, and students. It was a time when art and politics were inseparable, and Bhupen was at the centre.
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His songs were documents of their time; serious, sharp, but also suffused with compassion. They spoke of the hungry labourer, the majesty of the Brahmaputra, the frustrations of the poor, the struggles of peasants, and the hopes of a people caught in the turbulence of modern India.
In February 1972, Bhupen and his brother Jayanta performed at the Berlin International Festival of Political Songs, singing for workers, students, and revolutionaries. One of those songs celebrated the newly born Bangladesh, another voiced a confident Assam: Joy Joy Nobojato Bangladesh (Joy, Joy, Newly Born Bangladesh) and Ami Asomiya Na Hodukhiya (I am Assamese, not an Orphan).
His baritone, translated across languages, transcended borders; and yet, his music never lost its rootedness in the soil of Assam. He was as comfortable singing in Assamese as he was in Bengali or Hindi, and later, his compositions found audiences across the globe.
The political songster
Growing up in the 1990s, I arrived at Bhupen through his Hindi song, O Ganga Behti Ho Kyun (adapted from the Assamese classic Bistirno Parore) from his 1970 album, Gangotsav, and Dil Hoom Hoom Kare from the 1993 film Rudaali, like my younger brother, who remains a fan to this day. Inspired by Paul Robeson’s Ol’ Man River, the song addresses the Ganga — India’s most sacred and symbolic river — as if it were a living witness to history, injustice, and human suffering. On the surface, it is a lament that the river keeps flowing silently, “nishabd sada,” while people on both its banks cry out in anguish. But, at a deeper level, it is a scathing critique of society’s moral decay, inequality, and apathy.
The verses ask piercing questions. If ethics and humanity are destroyed, if the poor, illiterate, blind, and dispossessed continue to suffer, why does the Ganga remain indifferent? If history keeps crying out for change, why does the river not empower the weak to rise against oppression? The river becomes a metaphor for nature’s silence in the face of human cruelty, but also for society’s own complacency. Bhupen contrasts the river’s eternal flow with the stagnant moral condition of people — “vyakti rahe vyakti kendrit, sakal samaj vyaktitva rahit”—a society full of self-centered individuals but without collective soul or purpose. It is both an elegy and a challenge: Why don’t you, O Ganga, stir us into struggle and renewal?
In the closing verses, Bhupen sharpens the allegory. He calls the world “unmad avani Kurukshetra bani” — the earth has become a frenzied battlefield like the mythic Kurukshetra. He appeals to the Ganga as “janani,” a mother who should nurture and inspire, but instead remains passive. He asks why in modern India there are no new Bhishmas, no warriors of truth emerging to fight injustice. The song is, thus, not about the Ganga’s waters alone; it is about India itself. It is about a nation that has allowed corruption, inequality, and exploitation to continue even as its people remain silent.
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Bhupen’s politics were as fluid as his river. By the 1980s, he gravitated toward Assamese nationalism, reshaping some lyrics to fit the demands of a more regionalist mood. He dabbled in electoral politics, becoming an independent MLA in 1967, losing in 1971, and then, most controversially, contesting as a BJP candidate in 2004. The last was a failure, and it exposed the limits of right-wing Hindutva in Assam’s cultural-political terrain; in 2016, this would change, with BJP forming the government for the first time in the state under the leadership of Sarbananda Sonowal.
Bhupen’s songs reflected the changing political moods of Assam. They were tools of nationalist mobilisation, but also an indictment of authority. They contained Assamese modernity in all its contradictions: a small, proud community negotiating its place within India. His lyrics often moved between the local and the universal, showing his listeners of their shared humanity even while evoking the specificity of their land. In one song, he spoke of the world’s bridges connecting people; in another, of the need for humanity beyond caste, creed, and nationality. He could sing of famine, of flood, of poverty, and in the next breath, of love, tenderness, and spirituality.
His journalism — particularly with Amar Pratinidhi — also featured this concoction of politics and culture. He wrote with sharpness about government failures, mocked the inability to address peasant struggles, and constantly turned the spotlight toward the downtrodden. To his listeners, his songs were “weapons of the weak,” giving dignity to those ignored by the state.
The dhumuha and the muse
Kalpana Lajmi, filmmaker (Rudaali, Darmiyaan: In Between, Daman: A Victim of Marital Violence, Kyon? and Chingari) and long-time companion, once described meeting the 45-year-old Bhupen in Bombay as encountering a dhumuha — a short, tempestuous storm sweeping across the Brahmaputra’s riverine world. Wild, charismatic, passionate, and brilliant, he came across to Lajmi as tender, generous, and infinitely empathetic. His personality had the traits of a storm: destruction and renewal, turbulence and nurture.
Lajmi, the niece of filmmaker Guru Dutt, fell in love with the creases of his smile, the crinkle of his eyes, and the silver warmth of his laughter. In her presence, he found a measure of domestic peace, though his life remained haunted by family rivalries, the loss of parents, a wrecked marriage, disillusionment with his only son, and a gnawing sense of being unaccepted by the wider Indian cultural establishment.
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However, the songs that Bhupen had come to sing in the world did not remain unsung. “Moy jetiya ei jiyonor maya eri ghusi jaam” (“When I leave all my attachments and depart from this world”) — sung in his rich, timbered voice — resonated like the Brahmaputra itself: deep, masculine, melancholic. To hear him was to hear Assam's voice. He called himself a scion of the fisherman’s dynasty, carrying his love for the river to the world.
Even when poverty and frustration threatened to drown him, when he confessed that his linguistic limitations in Assamese and Bengali had hindered his pan-Indian acceptance, his ambition remained quietly burning. Bengal eventually accepted him, his jibon mukhi gaan (life-oriented songs) gained intellectual recognition, and from there, his legend spread far and wide.
By the 1980s and ’90s, his career touched unprecedented heights. His music was everywhere — cinema, concerts, politics, protests. Together with Lajmi, he entered cinema as a composer and collaborator, beginning with Ek Pal (1986), a film that cemented their creative and personal partnership.
They spent 35 years together, building a world outside the constraints of middle-class morality, even as Assam itself often failed to come to terms with their unconventional bond. To her, Bhupen was both poet and dreamer, man and myth. She nursed him through the years of decline, even as his mind continued to float on the Brahmaputra, carried by memories and visions of a perfect homeland.
Songs of the river and the world
The canon of Hazarika’s songs is staggering. In Assamese, Bengali, and Hindi, he sang of rivers, bridges, famine, love, loss, and revolution. Ami ek jajabor describes his travels across rivers and continents: from the Ganga to the Mississippi, the Volga to Ottawa, Austria to Paris, Chicago to Tashkent. It chronicles his encounters with different civilisations, histories, and struggles. He listens to Mirza Ghalib’s couplets in Central Asia, sits at the tomb of Mark Twain reflecting on literature, brushes the dust of Paris into his clothes; everywhere, he gathers impressions that shape his art. The world has become his home, and the road his permanent address.
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His wandering, however, is not escapism; it is a philosophy. He insists, “Prithibi amake apon korechhe, bhulechhi nijeri ghor” (the world has embraced me, I have forgotten my own home). What he means is that in leaving behind the narrow idea of home, he has discovered a greater belonging in humanity itself. But he does not romanticise what he sees. Alongside skyscrapers, he sees the homeless sleeping in their shadows. Alongside blooming flowers, he sees buds that withered before opening. Alongside love, he sees betrayal and broken homes. This constant duality — beauty and suffering, hope and despair — is at the heart of his jajabor identity. To wander is to witness all, not selectively but completely.
By refusing to be tied to one place, Hazarika becomes a man equally at home at all places. On his journey of compassion and humanism, the poor and dispossessed become his kin; strangers become family. He sings, “Pother manush apon hoyeche, apon hoyechhe por” (the people of the road have become my own, and my own have become strangers). This inversion reflects his political vision: solidarity with the marginalised over the comforts of privilege. To be a wanderer is to be free enough to love the whole world.
O Ganga Behti Ho Kyun, a personal favourite, is one of the greatest philosophical songs of modern India: it’s a meditation on history, inequality, and the cruelty of progress. In other songs, he sang of Assam’s tea gardens and the sweat of its workers, of the floodplains and the misery they inflicted. He sang love songs too, drenched in longing and sensuality, which makes him as much a romantic poet as a political one.
His songs carried his unmistakable sonority, and his voice became a bridge across regions. His critics sometimes accused him of compromising, of failing to challenge Bengali claims over his identity. But perhaps he understood that art is porous, that rivers cannot be fenced, and that songs belong to everyone who sings them.
Bhupen Hazarika died in 2011, but in many ways, he has never left. In Assam, his songs still waft across tea gardens and ferry ghats. In Bengal, his jibon mukhi gaan still appeals to intellectuals and lovers. He asked simple questions, like the refrain in Manuhe Manuhor Babe (People for People), questions that we continue to ask even today: “If humans do not care about humans at all… with a bit of sympathy, tell me — who will?”
