Bhupen Hazarika at 100: The songs that made humanity his homeland

On September 8, 1926, in Sadiya, Assam, was born a child who would eventually give a voice to an entire region and, more significantly, make that regional voice intelligible to the world. A century later, Bharat Ratna Dr. Bhupen Hazarika remains far more than the “Bard of the Brahmaputra”. He was a singer, composer, lyricist, filmmaker, scholar and public intellectual whose music travelled across linguistic, political and national boundaries. On his birth centenary, Assam and India are celebrating an artist whose greatest achievement was not merely making Assamese music known outside Assam, but demonstrating how deeply local art can become universal.

Hazarika’s international journey began intellectually as much as musically. His education at Banaras Hindu University and later his doctoral work at Columbia University exposed him to worlds far beyond Assam. In New York, his association with Paul Robeson was particularly transformative. Robeson’s music and civil-rights activism demonstrated to Hazarika how a singer could become the conscience of society. Hazarika absorbed that lesson without becoming an imitator. He brought it home and gave it an Assamese vocabulary. His adaptation of Robeson’s Ol’ Man River into Bistirno Parore became an extraordinary meditation on the Brahmaputra, suffering and human indifference. The song was subsequently rendered in Bengali and Hindi, including the widely known O Ganga Behti Ho.

This ability to travel without losing his cultural roots explains much of Hazarika’s extraordinary fandom. Bengal embraced him not as an outsider but as one of its own. His Bengali songs reached millions, while Bangladesh developed an especially deep affection for his music. A 2006 poll in Bangladesh reportedly placed Manush Manusher Jonno, the Bengali version of Manuhe Manuhor Babe, second only to the country’s national anthem in popularity. Such affection cannot be explained merely by linguistic familiarity. It reflected the extraordinary capacity of Hazarika’s music to convert a local experience into a universal emotion.

That fact is culturally significant. Hazarika demonstrated that borders may divide territories but need not divide emotions. The rivers that recur in his songs i.e. the Brahmaputra, Ganga, Padma, Meghna, Mississippi and Volga, became metaphors for a humanity connected by common experiences. His music did not erase regional identities; it showed that regional identities could coexist with universal fraternity.

His most enduring lesson is perhaps contained in Manuhe Manuhor Babe: human beings must stand by other human beings. Composed against the backdrop of Assam’s turbulent linguistic politics, the song nevertheless refused to become narrowly political. Its message was ethical rather than partisan. Human dignity, compassion and solidarity mattered more than the identities people inherited. That is why the song continues to resonate decades later.

In an age of increasingly shrill public discourse, this is not a sentimental message. It is a political necessity. Hazarika understood that societies do not collapse only because of economic deprivation or political conflict. They also deteriorate when empathy disappears. His songs repeatedly asked listeners to look at the person behind the category: the worker behind the statistic, the poor person behind the poverty figure, the migrant behind the label and the river-dweller behind the flood report.

His sympathy for ordinary people was not ornamental. His songs spoke about workers, peasants, marginalised communities and the oppressed. He believed that music could become what might today be called a medium of social accountability. He gave artistic dignity to lives that mainstream culture often ignored. His songs were therefore simultaneously entertainment, journalism and social commentary.

Bistirno Parore offered another lesson: beauty cannot be separated from responsibility. The Brahmaputra is magnificent, but Hazarika asks why such a mighty river should continue flowing indifferently while people suffer along its banks. Nature, in his imagination, was never merely scenery. Rivers carried memory, civilisation and moral questions.

That ecological consciousness deserves renewed attention today. Assam’s rivers face erosion, pollution, encroachment and changing hydrological patterns. To listen to Hazarika in the 21st century is therefore also to rediscover the river as something more than an economic resource or a geographical feature. The river is a witness to civilisation and, consequently, a test of our conscience.

His Moi Eti Jajabor offers yet another lesson: travel should enlarge the self rather than diminish one’s roots. Hazarika was a wanderer, but his wandering did not make him culturally rootless. His encounters with people and cultures elsewhere strengthened his understanding of Assam. His was a form of globalisation before the word acquired its present economic meaning i.e. a global citizenship rooted in local identity.

This perhaps explains why his music crossed borders so effortlessly. Translation was important, but translation alone cannot explain his popularity. His ideas were already universal. Love, loneliness, migration, injustice, labour, hope, rivers and fraternity do not require passports.

His national fandom similarly transformed perceptions of the Northeast. At a time when the region remained culturally distant from much of mainland India, Hazarika carried Assam’s voice into India’s popular imagination. His work in Hindi cinema, including the songs associated with Rudaali, demonstrated that an Assamese sensibility could enter the national mainstream without surrendering its distinctiveness. Dil Hoom Hoom Kare, originating in his Assamese Buku Ham Ham Kore, became one of the most recognisable expressions of longing in Hindi cinema.

The lesson for India is profound. National integration does not require cultural uniformity. It requires cultural conversation. Hazarika did not become nationally relevant by ceasing to be Assamese. He became nationally relevant because he remained deeply Assamese while speaking about experiences Indians everywhere could recognise.

That is why the centenary should not become merely a commemorative exercise of statues, concerts, stamps and ceremonial speeches. The more meaningful tribute would be to recover the ideas embedded in his songs. He taught that patriotism need not be hostile to humanity; that regional pride need not become exclusionary; that social criticism can coexist with love for one’s homeland; that folk culture can speak to the world; that political differences need not destroy human fraternity; and that an artist’s responsibility extends beyond applause.

At 100, Hazarika’s greatest audience may therefore still lie ahead. The world he sang about remains unfinished. Inequality persists. Rivers continue to suffer. Communities remain divided. Migrants still search for belonging. Politics still finds it easier to mobilise anger than compassion.

And so the old songs remain contemporary. Perhaps that is the real measure of a great artist and not how long his songs survive, but how long their questions remain unanswered.

A century after Bhupen Hazarika’s birth, the most important question he leaves us is also the simplest: if human beings do not stand by one another, who will?

The answer cannot merely be sung. It must be lived.