Zubeen Garg: Assam's first true rock star

The singer-songwriter has thousands of hits in different languages but it was his irreverence that gave him god-like status in a community starved of icons

- Tora Agarwala

One February night in 2023, Zubeen Garg stood before a crowd of thousands and declared that he would not sing.

"Some days you feel like singing. On others, you don't," Garg said in his signature drawl. "Today I don't."

The crowd in the eastern Assam town of Sivasagar erupted in protest. Fans had come from near and far, waiting for hours in the cold to watch him perform. But Garg had already walked off the stage and driven off into the night.

For a few days, the episode—among a long line of Garg's antics on stage, including sleeping and singing, drinking while singing, climbing up an electric pole mid-performance—drew ire. Some threatened to not allow him back into Sivasagar.

But less than two months later, Garg was back in town like nothing happened. He performed at Sivasagar's annual Bihu event like he always did: he sang, the crowd sang along and swooned.

All had been forgiven and forgotten as it always was with Garg: he was, after all, Assam's first true rock star, a mercurial maverick who had burst into the conservative Assamese music scene of the early 1990s out of nowhere, his unique voice and tender lyrics turning him into a sensation overnight when he was barely out of his teens. In the years that followed, Garg went on to record some 40,000 songs in multiple languages. However, his legacy extended far beyond the music he made.

He once stormed off stage when his hosts interrupted him for singing a Hindi song during a Bihu function, an act full of audacity in a state acutely sensitive about language. He was an equal opportunity offender: he refused to sing for big Bollywood directors simply because he didn't like the "way the song sounded".

Moi ghenta khatir nokoru, I don't give a damn, Garg said, time and again. Answering to absolutely no one, Garg's irreverence over the years catapulted him to a godlike status for a community starved of icons.