Finding Zubeen, One Year On

A year is a strange measure of absence. It is long enough for the first shock of loss to settle into remembrance, yet short enough for the person who has gone to remain almost physically present in collective memory. On the first anniversary of Zubeen Garg's death, Assam will remember him through songs and photographs, memorial gatherings and performances, anecdotes among friends, and the personal memories millions continue to carry.

I find myself returning to a question that has followed me in different forms almost from the moment we lost him: after all our remembering, how well have we understood him?

I have written about Zubeen several times during this extraordinary year, and only in retrospect do I see a progression. In the immediate aftermath, in “When Emotion Becomes Evidence: How Zubeen Garg's Case Spiralled into a Narrative War”, I was struck by how shock could become suspicion, distrust and mobilisation, and how emotionally compelling narratives could move ahead of evidence. More than a month later, in “Zubeen: From Paradox to Parable”, I worried that collective grief was turning a rebellious, contradictory and undogmatic human being into a purified moral symbol.

Later, in “When Genius Reaches the Threshold, but the Human Being Does Not”, I approached Zubeen through the unevenness of exceptional human development: how someone may travel far in one dimension of human possibility while remaining vulnerable and unfinished in others. At six months, in “A Memorial That Must Live”, I argued that his more enduring memorial should remain alive in new singers, opportunities for young musicians, experimentation and the continuing flow of Assamese music. These pieces were not intended as a sequence, yet they had been circling one unresolved question: who was the human being we were so determined to remember?

Two conversations have unexpectedly given me another way of approaching that question. One is Rita Choudhury's long conversation with Zubeen himself, recorded shortly before his death and subsequently watched by millions. The other is a far less noticed conversation with Utpal Sarma, a musician who had worked within Zubeen's creative world during important periods of his career.

They are not competing testimonies. Nor is what follows an attempt to decide which interviewer "understood Zubeen better". That would reduce something interesting to something trivial. They are better thought of as two windows opened on the same human being from different positions. Because the windows are different, different things become visible through them.

What began as curiosity about the difference between these conversations became a larger question: why can we know so much about another human being and still fail to understand them? Why can empathy coexist with interpretive distance? And what happens when the person before us appears not merely to use metaphor, but to think through it?

Those questions eventually brought me back to one extraordinary moment: a captain, an open sea, a distant lighthouse, and no map.

The First Window: A Life as Story

Rita Choudhury's conversation deserves its place in the Zubeen archive. One of Assam's distinguished novelists sat opposite one of its most consequential contemporary artists and gave him unusual space to speak about childhood, family, creativity, success, exhaustion, responsibility, mortality and the burden of becoming a public possession.

There was warmth, curiosity and genuine concern, and Zubeen was unusually candid. I knew more about the events and experiences of his life after watching it. Yet I did not feel I knew correspondingly more about the peculiar mind that had lived them.

Months later I encountered the Utpal Sarma conversation. Its audience was tiny by comparison, and there were few sensational new facts. Yet something vague after the first interview was becoming visible.

Utpal did not seem interested in explaining Zubeen. He seemed to recognise the landscape from which Zubeen spoke. That sent me back to Rita's conversation not to judge it but to listen differently. Only then did I begin to appreciate that the difference might lie less in the questions asked than in the horizons from which they arose.

Every Listener Lives Inside a Horizon

Hans-Georg Gadamer complicated the idea that good listening simply means approaching another person with an open mind. None of us arrives empty-handed. We inhabit what he called a horizon: a world formed by language, education, profession, culture, memory and experience. We do not first perceive neutrally and then interpret; our horizon already shapes what we notice.

Assamese culture has an economical expression which, though usually used differently, comes close to this insight: মানুহ পৰিস্থিতিৰ দাস - human beings are subject to circumstance. We ordinarily understand পৰিস্থিতি materially, but our intellectual habits are circumstances too. A scientist notices evidence, a lawyer argument, a historian continuity, a novelist story. None is wrong or complete.

Seen this way, Rita Choudhury's conversation becomes more interesting. She listens as a novelist naturally listens, seeking the narrative unity of a life: childhood illuminating the adult, experience explaining behaviour, fame becoming burden as well as achievement. There is great value in this. But every horizon that illuminates also casts a shadow.

There are moments in the conversation when Zubeen quietly leaves narrative behind. He no longer seems to explain what happened to him or why. Instead, he begins speaking through images. It was here I encountered the captain.

When Metaphor Becomes Thought

The first time I heard Zubeen speak of the captain, the sea, the lighthouse, and the absence of a map, I regarded it as a beautiful metaphor. Returning to it, I began to wonder if that response was the problem.

Perhaps this was not a metaphor about his thinking. Perhaps the metaphor was the thinking itself.

We commonly treat metaphor as decoration: first comes the serious thought, then the poet or artist clothes it in an image. Yet work on language and cognition, from Paul Ricoeur to George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, challenges that assumption. Metaphor can be a mode of thought. Indian traditions make the intuition familiar: the Upanishads think through rivers, fire, trees, chariots and salt dissolved in water; the Bhagavad Gita begins not with a treatise but on a battlefield. Image, situation and thought emerge together.

Zubeen's captain therefore need not simply mean Zubeen, the sea life, or the lighthouse hope. Taken together, they form a symbolic landscape in which direction, danger, freedom, solitude, responsibility and purpose coexist. Such a landscape may be better entered before it is decoded.

Hindsight is both illuminating and unfair: no interviewer knows which passing image will later acquire significance. Still, I wondered what might have happened had the conversation remained there a little longer. Why is there no map? What is the lighthouse? Is the captain alone? Or perhaps the best intervention would simply have been: tell me more.

This led me to distinguish empathy from interpretive sensitivity. Rita's concern for Zubeen's wellbeing, health and burdens is evident. But interpretive sensitivity asks something different: not only what another person is saying, but how that person is thinking. Some minds organise experience analytically, some narratively, others through images, sounds, relationships and symbols.

Unless we recognise the mode of thought, we can translate one cognitive language into another without noticing. Beyond both empathy and interpretive sensitivity lies what I would call hermeneutic humility: the willingness to postpone interpretation, to remain briefly within another person's symbolic world before converting it into categories we already possess.

The Second Window: The Man Who Heard the Landscape

The Utpal Sarma conversation made me recognise this possibility because he seemed reluctant to translate Zubeen into a theory.

His relationship with Zubeen was not mainly that of interviewer and subject. As arranger, programmer and collaborator, he had participated in the musical environment itself. He was not reconstructing an unfamiliar world solely from what Zubeen told him; part of that world had been his own. This may be why his conversation feels less like explanation than recognition.

Formally, Utpal is answering an interviewer. At times, however, he seems to speak in three directions: to the interviewer, to the absent Zubeen, and to us. The result is almost a triangular conversation.

Gradually the subject ceases to be merely Zubeen's personality. Utpal speaks about musicians and studios, collaboration, audiences, commercial pressures and the compromises through which creativity becomes livelihood. Commerce is neither condemned nor offered as an excuse; it is part of the environment.

Here the old Assamese মানুহ পৰিস্থিতিৰ দাস returns with a second resonance.

Heidegger's Geworfenheit, or thrownness, names something similar at a deeper level: we discover ourselves already situated within a language, culture, history, family and set of circumstances. Freedom is real, but never exercised from nowhere.

Utpal's Zubeen is therefore not a genius floating above circumstance. He is immersed in it - constrained by it, resisting it, using its possibilities and sometimes transforming it.

This is a different way of approaching contradiction. Instead of asking which version of Zubeen was authentic—the rebel or the commercial artist, the solitary figure or the man surrounded by people, the free spirit or the bearer of immense public expectations—the contradictions can remain where they belong: inside the same human being.

Near the end, Utpal speaks of something like an expanded consciousness in Zubeen, an identification extending beyond human beings towards animals, nature and the wider living world. Yet he also resists deification: Zubeen should inspire people, but should not be turned into a divine being beyond ordinary humanity.

That struck me because I had arrived at a similar anxiety in From Paradox to Parable. Collective love can purify a dead person until contradiction disappears. But contradiction is not necessarily contamination; it may be evidence of humanity. To place an extraordinary person sufficiently high above us can become another way of avoiding the work of understanding him.

After listening to Utpal, I realised something curious. I had acquired remarkably few new facts about Zubeen. Yet I felt I understood more. The landscape had become visible.

Why Some Minds Remain Misunderstood

Celebrity creates a peculiar illusion of intimacy. We accumulate facts about someone until familiarity begins to resemble understanding: childhood, relationships, controversies, habits, successes and failures. Yet biography and ontology are not the same thing. Knowing what happened to someone does not necessarily tell us how that person inhabited reality.

This matters especially with artistic minds. In When Genius Reaches the Threshold, I argued that exceptional creativity does not imply that every dimension of a human being develops in parallel. The two interviews add another possibility: the artist may struggle to inhabit ordinary structures while society struggles to recognise the cognitive language through which the artist experiences the world.

We then do what human beings naturally do: we translate. Metaphor becomes psychology, contradiction character, restlessness biography, symbol proposition. The resulting explanation may contain truth; it may simply not contain enough of it.

This is where Gadamer's fusion of horizons becomes useful. Understanding does not occur because one horizon conquers another, but because the encounter with another person's horizon modifies ours. Empathy says, I can feel something of what you feel. Hermeneutic humility adds, I may not yet understand what your words mean within your world.

Two Windows, Not Two Verdicts

It would be unfortunate if this essay were read as arguing that Utpal Sarma understood Zubeen while Rita Choudhury did not. Placed beside each other, the conversations are more valuable than that.

Rita's interview gives us Zubeen speaking extensively about himself. Its narrative instinct draws out childhood, experience, burden, affection and vulnerability; without it, we would not possess the captain, sea or lighthouse in the first place. Utpal, having inhabited part of Zubeen's creative environment, helped me recognise that some of this apparently colourful language might deserve to be treated as a mode of cognition in its own right.

The second window therefore changed what I saw through the first, while the first gave the second much of its meaning. Understanding emerged not from choosing between the horizons, but from allowing them to meet.

Finding Zubeen, One Year On

A year after Zubeen Garg's death, Assam does not need reminding that he mattered. The harder inheritance may be learning how to listen to what remains.

Perhaps remembrance requires a form of discipline: not purifying too quickly, not explaining too quickly, not turning metaphor into diagnosis, and not mistaking knowledge of someone's story for knowledge of the world from which that story was lived.

Six months after Zubeen's death, I argued for a memorial that remained alive in young musicians, experimentation and new creation. A year after his death, I would add something less tangible: curiosity - the willingness to keep encountering Zubeen rather than completing him.

There may never be a final Zubeen for us to discover. There are different windows - the novelist's, the collaborator's, the audience's, the friend's, and the artist's own metaphors - and beyond them a part of another consciousness that remains inaccessible. Accepting that limit does not defeat understanding; it makes us more careful about what we claim to understand.

I began with two conversations because one had left me restless and the other unexpectedly absorbed me. I thought I was trying to discover which brought me closer to Zubeen. A year later, that no longer seems the right question.

One allowed me to know more about him. The other changed the way I listened to what I already knew. Together they suggested that one obstacle to understanding another human being is our eagerness to understand him too soon.

So on this anniversary, perhaps we can allow the captain to remain upon his sea a little longer, looking towards his lighthouse and travelling without his map, before we tell him what it all means.

Let's listen.

References and Conversations

1. Sarma, Jayanta Biswa. “When Emotion Becomes Evidence: How Zubeen Garg’s Case Spiralled into a Narrative War.” Space and Culture, India, 13(3), 2025, pp. 8–15. DOI: 10.20896/memcq968. https://www.spaceandculture.in/index.php/spaceandculture/article/view/1834/636

2. Sarma, Jayanta Biswa. “Zubeen: From Paradox to Parable.” The Assam Tribune, 7 November 2025.

3. Sarma, Jayanta B. “When Genius Reaches the Threshold, but the Human Being Does Not.” India, Assam & the Civic Imagination, Substack, 4 July 2026. https://jayantabsarma.substack.com/p/when-genius-reaches-the-threshold

4. Sarma, Jayanta Biswa. “A Memorial That Must Live: Remembering Zubeen Garg.” India Today NE, 20 March 2026. https://www.indiatodayne.in/opinion/story/a-memorial-that-must-live-remembering-zubeen-garg-1362919-2026-03-20

5. Choudhury, Rita. Conversation/podcast with Zubeen Garg, recorded shortly before his death. [Insert original YouTube URL.]

6. Sarma, Utpal. Interview reflecting on Zubeen Garg and their musical association. [Insert original YouTube URL.]

7. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method.

8. Ricoeur, Paul. The Rule of Metaphor.

9. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By.

10. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time.


(Author’s Note: Each essay begins with a question, observation, experience or public event worth examining beyond its immediate controversy. I determine the argument, structure and final prose, drawing on professional experience and research. I use AI as an editorial collaborator to research, develop structure, clarify, draft and edit until a piece accurately reflects my thinking and intent. The final wording and responsibility remain mine.)