Finding Him in the Land That Once Banned Him: Zubeen Garg in Meena Bazar, on Tom-Toms, and the Satra Spaces in Majuli Island

The ban came first. Before the mourning, before the tributes, before Majuli began singing him again. In April 2024, the Majuli Zila Satra Mahasabha passed a resolution banning Zubeen Garg from performing on the island. 

The trigger was his acceptance speech at the 66th Central Rongali Bihu Sammelan on 22 April, where he questioned the use of the titles “Prabhu” and “Ishwar” for the Satradhikars in Majuli and claimed that no man should be referred to as god.

Ironically, after his passing, many now present him as “Ishwar-Putra” (god’s son), adorning him with divine powers he never asked for.

On that day in Majuli, in his own casual style, Zubeen called out a five-hundred-year-old feudal system. He also urged the audience to understand the character of Krishna in Hindu mythology as a human, an imperfect man, rather than a distant divine force.

The leadership of the Satra Mahasabha framed this as an unacceptable, derogatory remark and as an attack on the public’s religious sentiment.

In a meeting on 26 April 2024, proposals were made to revoke his Sangeet Sindhu honour and ban Zubeen Garg from performing in Majuli Island.

However, the video footage from that evening interestingly exhibits something entirely different. When he made those remarks, the audience broke into loud, unhesitating applause.

If offence was felt, then perhaps it was felt by the custodians of institutional authority and gatekeepers of “culture” and not by the common people who heard him speak that night.

I arrived in Majuli in November 2025, two months after Zubeen’s untimely death. The uneven road to the island usually prepares you for what lies ahead, but this time the shift was immediate.

The first thing I heard on the island was Zubeen’s voice. “NokolaKothati…” came ringing in the air from a shop half open. A tom-tom (e-rickshaw) passed with another track with “Joy Zubeen Da” written on its back.

A tea stall began its morning with one of his older songs.. “Gagorikokalot, Rodalidugalot..”In each roadside electric pillar, a photo of him was tied carefully with the #JusticeForZubeenGarg slogan.

Restaurants as well as small eateries all placed Zubeen’s picture at their entrances. Majuli felt familiar and unfamiliar at once. Four years had passed since my last visit, and the island had changed in unfathomable ways.

New shops, cafés, homestays and signboards have mushroomed in the island’s landscape, shaped by the growing force of religious tourism and what the locals call the “foreigner season”. But the commercial shifts were not what struck me first.

What struck me was hearing and seeing Zubeen everywhere. Zubeen’s voice filled the roads, the marketplaces in a silent, mundane manner, as if the island had forgotten how to listen to anyone else’s songs. The same Majuli that had refused him now carried him everywhere.

Zubeen has become what the island’s everyday sounds and looks like. The contradiction was stark; if the ban had been issued in the name of public sentiment, it seemed the public had clearly not endorsed it.

The contradiction became sharper as I reached AuniatiSatra to witness its popular annual festival, Paal-Naam Mahotsav. The venue opened with a crowded Meena Bazar, which called itself a Trade Fair.

Two large commemorative spaces for Zubeen stood at the entrance, his music playing behind them. As I walked through the stretch, moving past rows of stalls selling stones, bracelets, oils, powders and quick spiritual fixes, I watched astrologers sitting on the ground, working with the worries and fears of whoever stopped by.

Quacks offered remedies for pain, bad luck and loss. It was exactly the kind of marketplace Zubeen would have critiqued. His songs played from speakers tied to bamboo poles.

Food stalls named themselves after the names of Zubeen’s popular songs. Several jewellery shops carried posters of his wife, Garima Saikia Garg, at their entrances, her image set above trays of imitation gold and bright stones. 

Stalls sold T-shirts printed with Zubeen’s face and lyrics. The permanent shops near the main gate of the Satra, usually lined with framed photographs of Satradhikars, deities and sometimes Sankardev for sale, had their displays arranged under tarpaulin sheets.

This time, those same shopfronts also held framed photographs of Zubeen. Near the entrance, a blind girl sat with a microphone and a karaoke speaker, singing his songs, a basket beside her collecting the small gestures people offered as they passed.

Only after crossing this entire stretch did the Satra premises begin. Inside, the noise of the bazar dropped away. Paal-Naam was underway, the sound of Naam-kirtan, khol and taal echoing from the namghar.

On the second day of my visit, a Hall of Fame, which was yet to be named when I enquired, was inaugurated in the AuniatiSatra premises. The space was curated to display the Satradhikar’s accomplishments, rows of framed Smarak Patra arranged with neatness and care, and in a corner, placed quietly among them, sat a small photograph of Zubeen.

The frame was no larger than six or seven inches. In the picture, he was smiling widely, almost satirically, as if he recognised the irony of his presence in that room. The expression seemed to mirror the atmosphere around him.

His image in that setting felt something unresolved, an odd gesture that unsettled more than it explained. The in-charge of the hall, an amicable old Bhakat, handed me the latest issue of the Satra’s quarterly magazine, Sanskriti Pallav (Oct-Dec issue).

The first essay, titled “Zubeen Ekak, Adwitiya” (Zubeen: Singular and Unmatched), was written by the Satradhikar Dr SriSriPitambardev Goswami himself, calling Zubeen “Maatir Shilpi” (Artist of the land) and “Shishtachari” (well-mannered).

The back cover of the magazine carried his photograph with a Ghosha written by Sankardev and a note in his memory by the editorial team.

Placed against the memory of the ban, the back cover read like a correction, almost like a control. It tried to fold Zubeen back into the Satra’s narrative and to its moral geography, although the public had reclaimed him long before the institution chose to place his photograph beside a Ghosha.

The irony lay in the timing itself. Only when the island was filled with his voice did the institution find space for him on its pages.

The gesture acknowledged, without saying so, that the sentiment of the people was no longer something the gatekeepers of Majuli’s Satra culture could afford to stand against.

Yet none of these gestures met the substance of what Zubeen had pointed to. Bhakti and Vaishnavism, the foundations of the Satra system in Assam, speak in an egalitarian vocabulary, yet the daily life of the Satras is organised through a hierarchy that almost everyone I spoke to on the island recognises.

Devotees kneel on the ground with their foreheads touching the floor as they pray to the Satradhikar, addressed as “Prabhu-Ishwar,” while Nirmali (flower petals as a blessing) is dropped from above by the Satradhikar rather than placed in their hands.

The distance is maintained and access is granted through the grammar of caste, lineage, prestige and power. These arrangements determine who can stand close, who must remain at a distance, and who stays peripheral even during prayer.

People in Majuli know this intimately. They whisper about it in private spaces, but those conversations fail to make any dent on the hierarchies, exclusions and forms of untouchability that persist on the island.

This inevitably turns toward a silence that Assamese academia has maintained with careful consistency. How is it that a popular singer articulated, in a brief and unscripted interaction, what decades of scholarship on Majuli have largely declined to confront?

Many have built careers by turning Majuli into a cultural exhibit, an exotic ethnographic object, a brochure-worthy spectacle. Some now reign in global academia as authoritative voices on the Vaishnava order of Assam, claiming intellectual mastery over its theology, its history and its ritual complex.

Yet their writing rarely approaches the politics of touch, distance, caste and entitlement that structure everyday religious life in the island. The Satra system is described, curated, archived and often romanticised, but its hierarchies remain conveniently untouched by scholarly scrutiny.

Why a Satradhikar must remain physically non-touchable, why Nirmali is dropped rather than placed, why some bodies receive access while others are kept at a distance, and why devotion is graded through caste and social capital.

These are questions that can unearth the issues of caste and religious power, yet they seldom enter the vocabulary of academic critique. These omissions reflect the negotiations, dependencies and tacit expectations that shape research in environments where proximity to authority is both an asset and a constraint.

In this sense, the ban on Zubeen exposed how fragile institutional authority is, how tightly critique is policed, and how he became the unexpected and unacceptable force who crossed that line.

What Zubeen did was name the hierarchies and inequalities others conveniently choose to leave unnamed. He said in public what many say privately. He refused to separate faith from the social realities that shape it. His clarity was condemned not because it was wrong but because it was heard and undenied by the general public.

Majuli will keep singing Zubeen Garg in its own puzzling ways, but the question reaches far beyond the island. It asks whether any of us are willing to confront what his words unsettled.

Hierarchy survives most comfortably where devotion is expected to remain bereft of critique. Zubeen exposed a wider, uneven structure of authority, one in which critique is permitted only when softened, delayed or safely distanced from the speaker.

He challenged that structure by saying aloud what many already knew but did not dare to speak. The response to Zubeen’s statement revealed how closely those boundaries are guarded.

Returning to Majuli when Zubeen is no more, yet finding him everywhere in the land that once banned him, made me reflect on that contradiction even deeply. 

The ban reflected its own irrelevance; the island had moved on without waiting for permission from its so-called spokespersons. This 18th of November, Zubeen would have turned fifty-three.

He would have gone on challenging many more such structures and institutions that sit like a plague in Assamese society, that does not allow his vision of “One unified Assam” to take shape. 

He would have continued to offend the custodians of “civility” and “culture” who expect deference as a given. And he would have repeated, with the same unbothered clarity as always, “Ghentao kaku khaatir nokoru”.

(Dr Daisy Barman is a sociologist and teaches at the Gandhi Institute of Technology and Management, Bengaluru. Her work explores the intersections of religion, caste, politics, and subalternity, with a particular focus on Assam.)

Also Read: Zubeen Garg's Solemn Belonging: The Bard of the Luit Who Could Not Be Contained