Have you ever wondered when was the first time you heard Zubeen Da's songs?
I have. I tried to remember when I first heard Zubeen Garg, but I can't. There was never a particular moment when I discovered him because, in a way, he was already there before I was old enough to understand what his music meant. His voice was part of the background of my childhood, so familiar that I never stopped to think about where it came from.
I heard him on the radio, on television, from CD players at home and during journeys, and through Assamese films that were simply part of growing up. Movies such as Hiya Diya Niya and Daag belonged to that era of CDs and television where a song didn't need a streaming platform to become popular. Someone in the family would play a CD, a song would stay in everyone's head, and eventually we would all know it. Zubeen Da's songs travelled that way—from one home to another, from one generation to the next, without anyone needing to formally introduce him.
As a child, I didn't understand that I was listening to someone who would eventually become such a deeply rooted part of Assam's cultural memory. I wasn't thinking about his career or his influence. I was simply hearing a voice that seemed to be everywhere. It was only as I grew older that I began to understand why.
When I think about Zubeen Da now, I don't first remember concerts or huge crowds. I remember ordinary things.
I remember his songs playing somewhere in the house while everyone was busy doing something else. I remember hearing him during car journeys, when the road outside seemed to move with the music. I remember Assamese songs on television and the way certain melodies could instantly make a room feel familiar.
That is perhaps why his loss feels so personal to me. He was never confined to one particular memory. His voice is scattered across many of them.
There are people we remember because we spent important moments with them. Zubeen Da was different. I didn't spend those moments with him, but his music was there while those moments were happening. His songs became part of the atmosphere of my childhood without me ever realising that one day I would look back and miss that atmosphere.
This is what makes old music so strange. We think we are listening to a song, but years later we realise we were actually listening to a particular version of our own lives.
And then there was the man behind the music.
The older I became, the more I understood that Zubeen Garg's importance to Assam could never be explained simply through the number of songs he sang or films he worked in.
There was a stubbornness in him that I found deeply compelling. He was not someone who seemed comfortable keeping quiet simply because speaking might be inconvenient. He spoke about Assam, its people, its culture and its problems with a directness that sometimes made him controversial, but that directness was also part of what made people trust him.
He openly challenged things he believed were wrong. He stood against the ULFA's attempts to restrict artistes from performing Hindi songs during Bihu celebrations, arguing for artistic freedom and cultural diversity. He also became an outspoken opponent of the Citizenship Amendment Bill during the protests in Assam, taking part in artiste-led demonstrations rather than remaining on the sidelines.
I think that matters when we talk about what he meant to us.
He wasn't only singing about Assam. He was willing to stand up for the Assam he believed in.
And that made his connection with people feel much more complicated and much more real than simple celebrity admiration.
He spoke for the things he loved.
Another one of the things that stays with me most is his relationship with nature.
Zubeen Da had an almost childlike affection for trees, rivers and the natural world around him. He didn't speak about the environment like it was some distant issue that belonged to conferences and government reports. He spoke about it with the kind of personal attachment people usually reserve for something they consider their own.
When plans to cut trees around Dighalipukhuri in Guwahati sparked protests, Zubeen joined environmental activists and local residents and spoke openly against the proposal. He questioned whether destroying the greenery in the name of development could really be called progress.
What I find especially moving is that this wasn't simply something he started saying after becoming famous. His concern for trees and the environment was repeatedly expressed over the years. In one public appearance, when he was being honoured with traditional Assamese gamosas, he said that he preferred trees and asked people to give him trees instead.
That small sentiment says a lot about him.
He understood that loving Assam could not mean loving only its songs, festivals and traditions. It also meant caring about its rivers, forests, animals, hills and trees.
It meant asking what kind of Assam we were going to leave behind.
He wasn't afraid to stand where he believed he belonged.
I think this is one of the qualities that influenced me most about him.
There is a certain courage in being willing to say what you believe even when it is easier to remain silent. Zubeen Da had that quality. He spoke about political and social issues, but he was not simply a politician's supporter or an opponent. His positions came from his own understanding of Assam and the kind of society he wanted to see.
He described himself as a rebel and a social leftist, and his public life reflected a willingness to challenge established ideas. He spoke against caste divisions and emphasized humanity over religious or caste identity. His activism extended to issues ranging from education and animal welfare to environmental protection and the rights and concerns of people in Assam.
That part of his personality makes me think differently about the songs I grew up hearing.
There was always more behind them.
The tenderness in one song and the anger in another weren't necessarily separate sides of him. They came from the same person—the same person who could sing about love one day and then stand in front of a crowd demanding that something be changed the next.
One song that feels particularly relevant when thinking about this side of Zubeen Da is "Politics Nokoriba Bondhu". The song's central idea was a society that could rise above political divisions and recognise equality between people.
I think that tells us something important about how he saw his role.
He didn't seem to believe that being an artist meant staying away from everything happening around him. If anything, he seemed to believe that having a voice meant having some responsibility for how that voice was used.
That is something I admire.
We often talk about artists as entertainers, but Zubeen Da showed that an artist can also be a participant in the life of a place. He could make people dance, make them fall in love, make them nostalgic, and then use that same public platform to speak about an issue that mattered to him.
His music could be gentle, but the person behind it could be fiercely uncompromising.
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“Mayabini” became something else after he was gone
There are some songs I cannot hear in quite the same way anymore.
Mayabini is one of them.
I remember hearing “Mayabini ratir bukut…” long before I understood how deeply a song could become attached to memory. It was simply one of those songs that existed in the soundscape of growing up in Assam.
Now I hear it differently.
The song itself hasn't changed. The words haven't changed. The melody hasn't changed. I have changed.
Knowing that the voice behind it is gone makes the song feel almost unbearably intimate. What was once simply beautiful now carries grief.
And perhaps that is why music can be such a powerful part of mourning. We don't always know how to explain what we have lost, but sometimes a song says it for us.
When Assam came together and sang Mayabini after his death, it felt almost instinctive. We already knew the words. We already knew the melody. We didn't need to be taught how to mourn him.
We had been listening to him for years.
There is something else I have been thinking about since his death: how often Zubeen Da seemed to carry Assam with him.
He could have built his career elsewhere. He did work outside Assam and became known far beyond the state, but he repeatedly spoke about his attachment to Assam and his decision to remain rooted here. In one interview, he spoke about preferring Assam to the chaos of Mumbai and said that he wanted to live and die in his own land.
That choice has always felt significant to me. Because sometimes success creates distance from where a person began. Zubeen Garg's success seemed to make his connection with Assam stronger rather than weaker.
He never treated Assamese identity as something he had to outgrow. Instead, he carried it with him.
His Assam was bigger than one identity. What I find especially interesting about Zubeen is that his love for Assam did not appear to be about excluding people who were different from him. Accounts of his life and activism describe him as someone who spoke about humanity beyond caste, religion and social divisions. His idea of Assam was deeply rooted, but it was not necessarily narrow. He could be fiercely protective of Assamese culture while also arguing for artistic freedom and opposing forces that tried to dictate what people should sing, speak or believe.
That is an important part of the legacy I would like to remember.
Loving your home does not have to mean making someone else's home smaller.
For me, that is one of the most meaningful things about his public life.
His music taught us how to feel.
His life taught us that feeling strongly about something can also mean doing something about it.
He did not merely sing about Assam's beauty while watching it change around him. He spoke about the rivers. He protested the cutting of trees. He stood alongside people when issues affecting Assam's identity and future became contentious. His activism was not separate from his identity as an artist; the two seemed to constantly overlap. That makes me think of his songs differently.
Perhaps that is why his absence feels so strange. We didn't just lose the person whose songs we played. We lost someone who had a habit of saying things out loud when many people were only thinking them.
Someone once described him as a person who "said what we felt". That sentiment captures why his public voice became so important to many people in Assam.
When I was younger, I didn't understand any of this.
I didn't know that the singer whose songs were playing in the background was also someone who would stand up against the cutting of trees in Guwahati. I didn't know that he would use his popularity to speak against policies he believed would hurt Assam. I didn't know that he would challenge powerful people or that he would repeatedly choose to remain rooted in the place he came from.
I simply knew his voice. Maybe that is why growing up has changed the way I listen to him. As a child, I heard the singer. As I got older, I began to notice the person. And now, after his death, I find myself thinking about the entire picture—the music, the stubbornness, the compassion, the activism, the love for Assam and the refusal to become detached from ordinary people.
The hardest part is that everything is now a memory.
For years, Zubeen Da was someone I unconsciously imagined would simply continue to exist in the world. There would always be another song somewhere. Another performance. Another film. Another interview. Another moment when I would hear his voice unexpectedly and think, there he is again.
That assumption disappeared on September 19, 2025.
Now every song belongs to a different kind of time. There is no waiting for the next one. There is only returning to the ones we already have. And I don't think Assam was prepared for that kind of silence.
The scale of the mourning after his death showed just how deeply people had attached their own lives to his work. His songs became part of the public grieving, and Mayabini in particular became a song through which people expressed their loss.
It was almost as though Assam had lost someone from its own family.
When I try to explain why his death hurts me, I don't want to make it sound grander than it is.
It hurts because his voice was there when I was growing up.
It hurts because I heard him without thinking about how precious those ordinary moments would become.
It hurts because his songs are attached to people, places, journeys and years that I can never go back to.
It hurts because someone who spoke so loudly for Assam is suddenly silent.
It hurts because Zubeen Da's gone.
But I also feel grateful. I am grateful that I grew up in a time when his music was simply part of everyday life. I am grateful that I got to hear those songs not as pieces of history, but as living music. I am grateful that I got to know his voice before I fully understood the magnitude of the person behind it. And I am grateful that he never made loving Assam seem embarrassing or outdated. He made it feel natural. He made it feel young. He made it feel rebellious when it needed to be rebellious and tender when it needed to be tender.
I don't think Zubeen Garg's legacy needs to be protected by turning him into someone perfect.
He was human. He had his contradictions, his anger, his stubbornness and his flaws. What makes his life meaningful to me is not the idea that he was flawless, but that he was deeply invested in the things he cared about.
He cared about music.
He cared about people.
He cared about Assam.
He cared about trees and rivers.
He cared about culture.
He cared about freedom.
And he used the enormous voice he had been given to speak about those things.
Perhaps the best way to remember him is not simply by playing his songs on anniversaries or putting his photograph somewhere and calling it tribute. Perhaps it is by continuing to care about the things he cared about.
By protecting a tree instead of cutting it down.
By valuing our language without looking down on someone else's.
By standing up when something feels wrong.
By helping someone without waiting for recognition.
By allowing art to remain connected to ordinary people.
By loving Assam without believing that love requires hatred of anyone else.
That, to me, would feel more like remembering Zubeen than simply remembering his songs.
I still find it strange to write about Zubeen Da in the past tense. There are moments when I hear one of his songs and for a few minutes I forget that he is gone. The voice sounds exactly as it always did, and the memory feels complete. Then reality returns, and there is that small, painful realisation again.
He is no longer here.
But perhaps the songs don't need to become sad monuments to someone who is gone. They can remain what they always were.
Songs we grew up with.
Songs our parents knew.
Songs we will introduce to people younger than us.
Songs that will continue to play in cars and homes and gatherings.
Songs that will bring Assam back to someone who has moved away.
Songs that will make someone fall in love with the language all over again.
And somewhere in all of that, Zubeen Da will remain.
Not frozen in one photograph or one final performance, but moving through the lives of people who continue to listen.
I began this by saying that I don't remember when I first heard Zubeen Garg. Maybe now I understand why. He was never someone I discovered. He was someone I grew up with.
And that is why, even though I know he is gone, hearing his voice will probably always feel a little like coming home.
