Zubeen Garg was never easy to love

This September, as the mist starts settling over the Brahmaputra and the air turns just a little cooler, Assam braces for a date it has learned to hold with both grief and gratitude. September 19 is no longer just a date on the calendar,it's the day Zubeen Garg stopped singing to us and started living inside every song we still play.


Most tributes to Zubeen Garg read like hagiography, the golden voice, the generous heart, the cultural icon who gave everything to his people. All true. None of it explains why, a year on, Assam still talks about him the way you talk about someone who could infuriate you and win you back in the same breath.


The uncomfortable, more interesting truth is this: Zubeen was not easy to love. He walked off stages. He picked fights with organisers, with militant outfits, with his own audience. He once told a crowd, mid-controversy, "you cannot dictate me", and meant it as a life philosophy, not a one-off outburst. And Assam trusted him more for it, not less.


The man who showed up with nothing but a guitar


In April 2015, the Assamese community in Kuwait flew Zubeen in as a guest performer for their Bihu celebrations. One of Assam's biggest stars arrived in Kuwait for the second time and he landed with a single outfit, the one he was wearing, and nothing packed in his trunk but his guitar. No spare clothes, no luggage to speak of. The hosts who'd invited him as their star guest ended up having to take him shopping before he could even get through the event properly dressed.

Somewhere in that same trip, the Assamese heart-throb abruptly decided that the hair had to go with no real explanation and got his head shaved.

It's a small, almost throwaway detail next to the flood relief and the protest politics, and one that never really made it into any interview or profile. But it tells you something the bigger stories don't: this wasn't a persona he switched on for the cameras and off backstage. The same disregard for convention that made him defy an armed outfit's diktat on stage was the same instinct that saw no problem flying internationally to perform with nothing but a guitar and the clothes on his back. There was no audience for this version of him, no one to perform "unpredictable Zubeen" for. He was just Zubeen, everywhere, including straight off a flight at Kuwait International Airport, guitar in hand and one outfit to his name, where nobody but a handful of hosts would ever have known, until now.


He refused to be managed


In April 2017, at a Bihu function in Guwahati, the organisers cut him off mid-song for performing a Hindi track instead of sticking to Assamese numbers as agreed. Zubeen didn't apologise. He didn't finish the set either. He left. Later that same night, he turned up at another Bihu function down the road, all smiles, and sang till past 2 a.m. Two audiences, two completely different ‘Zubeens’, same evening and both were real.Years earlier, when the Paresh Baruah faction of ULFA issued a diktat telling artistes not to sing Hindi songs during Bihu, Zubeen didn't quietly comply and didn't quietly resist either. He said, on record, that no outfit had the right to draw a language border around an artist, and that music has no language and kept singing exactly what he wanted. This was not a safe position to take. People who defy armed groups in Assam don't always get to explain themselves twice. He did it anyway, repeatedly, for decades.


It cost him. At one point, a 24-year-old man was arrested for posting a death threat against him on Facebook, reportedly out of anger that Zubeen sang Hindi songs at Assamese festivals. A man threatened to kill a singer over a setlist. Zubeen's response, as reported by the Times of India, was to walk on stage that night anyway, performing from 10.50 pm to 1.30 am, and to joke afterward that it would take a "silver bullet" to kill him, the kind of throwaway line that only makes sense if you already know that in folklore, silver is the one thing that can bring down a werewolf or a vampire. That was the atmosphere around some of Zubeen’s choices: heated, personal and occasionally dangerous. He met it with the same humour he brought to everything else.


Loyalty, on his own term


Here's the part that doesn't fit the tidy narrative: the same man defending his right to sing in Hindi was also one of the most visible non-political faces of the Anti-CAA protests, fighting to protect Assamese identity from what he saw as an existential threat. Garg born into a Hindu Brahmin family was also the one who, by one account, handed over Rs 7 lakh from a concert's earnings to a madrasa for orphans in the middle of the night, no press release, no photo-op, the kind of story a Muslim cleric/Maulana would later recall on his own, saying Zubeen was not Hindu, not Muslim, but for all. Again he was also the same man who ran a charity foundation and turned his own house into a Covid centre also picked fights with corruption inside government recruitment processes through his own film, a genuinely risky thing to put your name behind in Assam. None of that is a contradiction if you actually look at what connects it. Zubeen never treated "loyalty to Assam" as a fixed script he was supposed to perform. He treated it as something he got to argue about, push back against, and defend on his own terms, even when that meant disagreeing with the very organisers and institutions claiming to protect Assamese culture. He idolised Che Guevara. That tells you more about how he saw himself than any obituary headline does.


Why Assam never turned on him


A polished icon is easy to admire and easy to forget. You nod at the plaque, you move on. Zubeen was neither polished nor forgettable, because he never let anyone, including his own fanbase, put him on a leash. He was self-declared "mad," and he said it not as a confession but almost as a warning: don't expect me to behave the way you think a beloved artist should behave.  


In a sit-down interview once, asked why he carried so much bitterness, he answered calmly: he was a rebel, a fighter, not a politician. He was not angry because he enjoyed being angry. He was angry because he was always fighting something and fighters don't come prepackaged as easy to like. That's precisely why the trust ran so deep. Assam didn't fall for a brand. It fell for a person who would walk off your stage if he disagreed with you, defy an armed outfit if he thought it was overstepping, hand cash to strangers at 2 a.m., fly across an ocean with nothing but a guitar and the clothes on his back, and still show up the next morning to play a charity football match for flood victims. You don't build that kind of relationship with the public by being agreeable or heavily curated PR agencies used by most if not all celebrities. You build it by being unmistakably, inconveniently yourself, over and over, until people realise the inconvenience was never the problem. It was proof that there would never be anyone else quite like him.


The Zubeen within, and what remains


A year later, the instinct is to smooth him into a saint, because grief likes clean stories. It's human nature: the same traits that got him called "mad" while he was alive turns into "freespirited" once he's gone, as if death itself edits the adjectives. But the more honest, and frankly more flattering, version of Zubeen Garg is the messy one: a man who could be petty and generous in the same week, who fought publicly and gave privately, who never once tried to make himself easier to deal with.


Maybe that’s also why so many people saw a little of Zubeen in themselves. Nobody actually likes being told what to do, not by a boss, not by a manager, not by anyone standing over them, but most people learn to swallow it, because fear or circumstances that leave no better option. Zubeen came from a conventional middle-class Assamese household and rose fast and far without ever picking up that fear along the way. He stayed “Bindass” through all of it, in every situation, with everyone, regardless of who he was up against. People didn't just admire that from a distance. They recognised it, because there's a small, rebellious version of Zubeen sitting inside most people too. He simply acted on it, out loud, for thirty years, while everyone else stayed quiet.


Assam is proud of him because the mess was never separate from the music, the charity, or the courage. It was the same restless refusal to sit still, applied to everything he touched. That's a much harder thing to manufacture than a legacy. And it's exactly why nobody's replacing him.