Very ominous! “Would you know my name if I saw you in Heaven?”—Eric Clapton’s immortal song on a personal tragedy was possibly the last song Zubeen Garg sang in a Singapore restaurant.
Given to roaming around the streets of Guwahati at night, Garg once encountered a homeless, mentally-imbalanced vagabond near the Ganeshguri crossing on one cold wintry night. An eyewitness said he hugged the disheveled person in front of him and told him: “Oi toi u pogola, moi u Zubeen pogola” (Hey, you are the mad one and I am Zubeen the mad one). Garg walked off after gifting the vagabond his own expensive jacket.
It wasn’t at all a one-off. Every day, on his way from the residence to the recording studio, Garg would be accosted by people in need of medical expenses, education fees, money for food… and he would hand them out money with gay abandon.
Villages in remote corners of Assam emptied out as people made a beeline to Guwahati to share the collective grief of the sudden demise of Garg in Singapore on September 19. Shops closed down, dark and deep sorrow invaded each and every home. That day, every home in Assam lost an immediate family member. It simply did not matter whether one was rich or poor, a Hindu or a Muslim, a tribal, a tea garden labourer, from the political Right, the Left or the Centre, or someone from the hardcore Assamese heartland or a Bengali-speaking ‘miya’ peasant toiling in the mid-day sun.
In his death, Garg stunned and shell-shocked a people that took him for granted and may have just given the people a new collective identity.
To explain the Zubeen Garg phenomenon, one can allude to what the bard of the Brahmaputra, Bhupen Hazarika, sang on the Indian coral tree in a song named ‘modarore phool’. While the ‘modar’ flower is not offered in the worship of the deities or serves any other practical need, its ‘redness’ is needed to spark infernos in the social order (‘modarore phool henu kaame kaaje nelage, laage pise xomajote jui jolaboloi’).
It took time for the national and mainstream media to comprehend the scale and intensity of the singer’s sudden demise in Singapore. The next few days saw surging crowds arriving in Guwahati, recording what the Limca Book of Records claims to be the fourth biggest gathering of humanity in history after the funeral farewells of Michael Jackson, Queen Elizabeth II and Pope Francis.
Garg was the flag-bearer of an angst that an Assamese mostly carries with him or her. The angst of a fragile identity on the fringes—one that lies in the cusp of strong sub-nationalism, the pull of ethnicity, and a broader national character—all placed inside the parameters of a syncretic and unique culture in a setting where races, ethnicities, cultures, traditions and belief systems have met. It is one place where ‘Sanskritisation’ and ‘tribalisation’—supposedly social processes at odds with each other—run parallel and concurrently.
And then there was a Zubeen Garg song for everyone—be it for the quintessential and humble farmer amid his crops in the Brahmaputra floodplains, the angry unemployed youth, the leaf-picker in the dark green tea garden, the tribal fisherman in his small boat or even the private professional burning the midnight oil in his corporate office—everyone thought Zubeen Garg sang only for him or her with his songs of love and solace, happiness and tragedy. And there was a Zubeen Garg song for every occasion.
He would sing a Bihu song like the ‘bihuwa’ from Sibsagar, the cultural heartland of Assam, a devotional ‘borgeet’ that would bring in the ambience of a ‘naamghor’ (Vaishvana monastery) in Majuli, a ‘lukogeet’ like a Goalparia or an ‘oinitom’ (song sung by the Mishing tribe) like the ko’wee (Mishing boy) and the ‘koneng’ (a Mishing maiden) in a ‘saang ghor’ (stilted house) and even a ‘zikir’ (Sufi devotional songs) with the same fervour.
Zubeen Garg brought all of them together with his political songs of being despondent with the existing system of the day, of loves and of happiness, giving them a collective identity and a unique consciousness.
With his more than 38,000 songs, he crossed emotional, cultural and generational boundaries with ease, even recording dozens of songs in a single day, he appealed to the young and the old. In him, the entire people of Assam came together—mesmerised, stunned at what they thought appealed to their respective conditions and states of mind.
Zubeen Garg was that and very much more.
Of short stature, unruly mop of hair, a snigger and impulsive damn-care attitude of total irreverence, dressed in whatever his mood of the day determines, ear rings and studs galore, replete with art tattooed on his body, Garg at once encapsulated the rebelliousness of the young ones, to laugh at the self-serving ineptness of the prevailing system, his songs were of hope, love, rustic lust and passion, and also of pessimism, the dark and of sheer helpnessness. His 38,000 songs in more than 40 languages exhausted each and every human emotion.
The Assamese are a peculiar race. Bihu songs are not sung from the throat; they originate in the core of the heart before resonating and blending into the sun-kissed surroundings of the familiar paddy fields and the gentle sway of the bamboo trees that skirt the rice fields. The devotional ‘borgeets’ have to bring in the solemn and profound ambience of the ‘naamghors’ (monasteries). Assamese songs of love, longing and passion have to soak heavy with the typical imagery around.
Garg did all that. That is why it is important to understand Garg first to understand Assam, and to understand Assam before trying to understand Garg. In his death, he has become more powerful than when he was alive.
Garg, our paths never crossed, and I don’t have a Zubeen story to tell, but Godspeed to rainbow land.
