The Face on the Windshield: Zubeen Garg and the Politics of Everyday Assam

Take a journey across Assam from the jam-packed streets of Guwahati to the highways of Upper Assam, from the bustling markets of Barpeta to the smaller towns of Nagaon and Jorhat. Along the way, one image is almost impossible to miss.

His face appears everywhere: pasted on taxi windshields, fixed above dashboards, painted across the backs of trucks, and proudly displayed inside autorickshaws. It is a face that has travelled far beyond the stage and the screen, becoming part of Assam’s everyday visual landscape.

The face is that of Zubeen Garg

It looks like simply a celebration of celebrity, at first glance. After all, popular singers and film stars have a loyal following. But the ubiquity of Zubeen's face on public transport in Assam implies more. Why would drivers want to put his picture in their cars? Why does this singer have to be everywhere? Why does his face seem to appear more frequently than the faces of politicians, religious leaders or national celebrities?

These questions can only be answered in the context of the world of everyday politics and culture, rather than the language of fandom. This phenomenon can be analyzed with the help of the tradition of Subaltern Studies. From that lens, the ubiquitous portrayal of Zubeen Garg in Assamese cars seems more like than just a tribute to the star, it’s a way for common folk, who are seldom represented in formal space, to voice a sentiment.

The Invisible People of History

The students of Subaltern Studies, especially Ranajit Guha, said that history is written from the point of view of the privileged. Historical narratives are controlled by the wealthy, power, politics, and government. The lives of ordinary people, farmers, labourers, drivers, vendors, workers, often are invisible.

The same is true with regard to today's public life. The backbone of Assam economy is constituted by the taxi men, bus conductors, truck operators, tea-garden workers and daily wage earners. They carry people, goods and stories from place to place throughout the state. But they are rarely found in newspapers, unless in times of crisis. They do not often influence public discussion. They fill public space, but have little influence in shaping it.

The image of Zubeen Garg comes into significance in this context. The image in a car is more than just decoration. It is a statement to identity, belonging. The car becomes a small space in which the driver can express who is important to him and what kind of cultural 'world' he lives in.

This is in contrast to political posters, which are typically top-downs from party campaigns and/or party machinery. No authority requires drivers to show them. They are one car at a time, through so many personal choices. It is their voluntary and collective nature and that is their strength.

More Than a Celebrity

One of the reasons for Zubeen Garg’s extraordinary popularity is the sense of familiarity that many Assamese people attach to him. For a large section of his audience, he is not experienced as a distant celebrity but almost as a member of an extended social and cultural family, a familiar figure who belongs to their world. Throughout his career, Zubeen cultivated a persona that was remarkably approachable, spontaneous and accessible. His songs spoke of love, migration, loneliness, friendship, social change and the rhythms of everyday life. More importantly, he sang in Assamese, in a language that his listeners recognised not simply as a medium of communication but as their own language, carrying their memories, emotions and everyday experiences.

This familiarity also distinguished Zubeen from the conventional image of the celebrity who maintains a carefully constructed distance from his or her audience. Zubeen was often spontaneous and unpredictable in public, sometimes forthright and controversial, and rarely appeared invested in performing the polished, controlled persona expected of a conventional star. Whether one agreed with him or not, there was a perception that he was being authentically himself. His appeal, therefore, rested not merely on celebrity but on a particular kind of perceived genuineness.

This relationship can be understood through Antonio Gramsci’s concept of the “organic intellectual.” Gramsci used the term to describe figures who emerge from within a social group and articulate its experiences, aspirations and contradictions. Unlike the detached expert who speaks about a community from outside it, the organic intellectual is embedded in the social world of the people whose concerns he or she expresses. Such a figure does not simply represent a community; he or she becomes part of the community’s way of understanding itself.

Zubeen Garg occupies a comparable cultural position for many Assamese people. He is often perceived not as someone imposed upon Assamese society from outside, but as someone who emerged from within it and carried its linguistic and cultural identity with him. His success did not require him to distance himself from his Assamese identity; instead, that identity became central to his public persona. Consequently, his achievements can acquire a collective meaning: when Zubeen succeeds, performs before a large audience, or gains recognition beyond Assam, many of his listeners experience that success, at least symbolically, as their own.

This helps explain the significance of something as seemingly ordinary as a taxi driver placing Zubeen’s photograph inside a vehicle. The photograph is more than an object of admiration or a decorative image. It is an act of recognition. By placing Zubeen inside the taxi, the driver is, in a sense, bringing into his everyday workspace someone he considers familiar, a figure who speaks his language, understands his cultural world and embodies experiences that feel close to his own. The image establishes a symbolic relationship between the driver and the star: this is not simply someone we admire; this is someone who belongs to our world.

Zubeen’s photograph on a dashboard, therefore, tells us something larger about celebrity in Assam. It reveals how a popular cultural figure can move beyond entertainment and become embedded in the everyday emotional and cultural life of a community. His face becomes not merely the face of a star, but a familiar face through which people recognise something of themselves.

The Taxi as a Cultural Space

A taxi or bus is conventionally understood as a functional object, a machine designed to transport people from one place to another. Yet, when we look closely at its everyday interiors, the vehicle reveals itself as much more than a means of mobility: it becomes a personal, cultural and affective space. Religious images, family photographs, football-club emblems, political symbols, local artwork, stickers and favourite quotations routinely transform these otherwise utilitarian machines into intimate extensions of the people who inhabit them. In Michel de Certeau’s terms, everyday users do not simply occupy spaces designed for them; through their ordinary practices, they appropriate, personalise and re-make them. The taxi, therefore, may legally and economically be a commercial vehicle, but for its driver it can become a moving expression of self, memory and belonging. Within this visual landscape, the image of Zubeen Garg acquires a particularly powerful significance. Before a word is exchanged between driver and passenger, his face can establish a quiet cultural connection, a recognition of shared memory, emotion and Assamese identity. The taxi thus becomes a mobile cultural space, carrying not merely passengers but also memories, affiliations and ideas of belonging across roads, markets, villages and cities. Each image may appear individually insignificant, yet collectively these thousands of moving images constitute what might be called a nomadic public sphere: a dispersed visual field through which cultural identity travels through everyday mobility. Zubeen’s image on the dashboard is therefore not merely decoration; it is a small but visible act of cultural remembrance, turning the road itself into a moving archive of Assam’s collective memory and identity.

A Quiet Resistance to Cultural Dominance

The appeal of Zubeen Garg’s image, however, cannot be understood in isolation; it must be situated within the broader landscape of Indian media culture, where regional identities have long negotiated the powerful presence of Hindi cinema, national television and metropolitan entertainment. Across much of India’s public visual culture, the faces of Bollywood stars, national political leaders and corporate brands have become almost ubiquitous, occupying billboards, screens, commercial spaces and everyday objects. Their omnipresence can, at times, render regional cultural identities less visible within the larger national imagination. This tension has been particularly pronounced in Assam and the wider Northeast, a region with an extraordinary literary, musical and cultural inheritance, yet one that has frequently remained peripheral to dominant national narratives. For decades, people from the Northeast have spoken of being stereotyped, misunderstood or simply overlooked by mainstream media. It is against this backdrop that Zubeen Garg’s cultural significance becomes especially striking. His remarkable popularity beyond Assam did not require him to shed his linguistic and cultural rootedness; instead, he demonstrated that regional belonging and wider cultural success need not be opposing possibilities. For many taxi and bus drivers, therefore, choosing Zubeen’s image over that of a Bollywood celebrity is more than an expression of personal preference. It is a subtle act of cultural selection: a decision about whose face deserves to occupy public space, whose memory should travel, and whose identity should be made visible. The image does not protest, demand, march or shout. It simply remains there, quietly looking out from a dashboard or windscreen yet its very presence carries an assertion: Assamese cultural icons, too, deserve to be seen, remembered and accorded respect. This is a form of resistance without confrontation, a politics of everyday visibility enacted not through protest but through practice. In choosing what to display, ordinary people participate in producing the cultural landscape around them. The dashboard thus becomes a small site of cultural agency, where the seemingly mundane act of placing a photograph becomes a quiet declaration of belonging and a refusal to allow regional identity to disappear within the visual dominance of the national mainstream.

Assam is a deeply diverse society, marked by multiple ethnicities, languages, religions and cultural traditions, differences that are often sharpened by political contestations. Yet Zubeen Garg occupies a rare cultural space that cuts across many of these boundaries. His songs travel through urban and rural communities, across generations, classes and religious and ethnic groups, becoming part of the everyday lives of students, workers, professionals and families. His photograph displayed inside taxis and buses therefore carries a significance beyond personal admiration: it becomes a shared cultural reference in a socially fragmented landscape. This does not imply that everyone interprets Zubeen or his music in the same way, but his image can evoke a reservoir of common memories, emotions and experiences. In this sense, his cultural presence contributes to what may be understood as an affective form of belonging, a sense of community produced not through legal citizenship, political ideology or institutional affiliation, but through shared cultural memory. A passenger who sees his photograph may recall a song, a journey, a celebration, a heartbreak or a particular moment in life; sometimes that recognition becomes a conversation between strangers. Such seemingly ordinary encounters accumulate into a quiet cultural bond. The windshield photograph thus becomes more than decoration or personal choice: it represents a form of community grounded in shared memory, emotion and cultural belonging.

Vehicles as Mobile Memorials

In the wake of Zubeen Garg's demise, his image seems to have gained visibility. Murals, posters, tribute events, social media postings and photographs of vehicles have proliferated across Assam.
Memory has been a preoccupation of Subaltern Studies scholars for a long time. However, the following question is not just who is remembered, but how he or she is remembered and by whom.

Official memory is generally in the form of statues, museums, government sponsored memorials, and state ceremonies. These are arranged in a top-down fashion. They need institutional support and resources.
However, the memory of Zubeen can sometimes be quite different. This is non-centralised and non-formal. It is maintained by drivers, shopkeepers, students, musicians, and “ordinary citizens” through their daily actions.
His picture is put in a taxi and makes a small mobile memorial. It doesn't stand still like a statue, but moves around to towns and villages. It is not just a space for memory but also a space for everyday life. Collectively, thousands of these vehicles constitute a people's archive, one that is not government controlled but carried by people.

Conclusion: Reading Assam through the Driver’s Seat

The photograph of Zubeen Garg behind an Assamese windshield may seem, at first glance, like an insignificant detail of everyday life. Yet precisely in its ordinariness lies its significance. It opens a window into a deeper social history of Assam, one written not only in institutions, elections and newspapers, but in the intimate choices people make about what they remember, whom they admire and what they choose to make visible. In a public visual culture crowded with political leaders, corporate brands and national celebrities, the decision to place Zubeen’s face on a dashboard becomes a quiet reclamation of cultural space. The taxi is no longer merely a vehicle; it becomes a moving archive, carrying memory, identity and belonging across Assam’s roads. And the photograph becomes more than an image: it is a small act of authorship through which ordinary people participate in telling the story of who they are. There is no slogan, procession or confrontation here, there is only presence. Yet thousands of such presences, moving silently through towns, villages, markets and highways, can constitute a powerful cultural statement. Perhaps this is where the politics of Zubeen Garg’s image ultimately resides: not in what it demands, but in what it makes visible. In choosing to carry his face, people are quietly insisting that Assam’s cultural memory belongs in public space and that its stories, songs and icons deserve not merely to survive, but to be seen.


(Alankar Kaushik teaches media studies at EFL University, Shillong Campus and Pallavi Devi teaches Constitutional Law at Gauhati University, Assam)