When The River Split in Two: Assam Between Bhupen and Zubeen

There are moments in the life of a land when its music changes shape — not because its people wish it, but because history demands it. In Assam, one such moment unfolded silently, almost imperceptibly, as the voice of Bhupen Hazarika faded into memory and another, more restless voice took its place. Zubeen Garg arrived not as a successor but as a divergence — a river breaking away from its parent stream, carrying the same waters but flowing through a changed world.

Bhupen’s voice was a bridge. It joined the margins to the centre, the silenced to the spoken, giving melody to the peasant, the labourer, the boatman, and the refugee. He sang of humanity as a shared inheritance, turning the suffering of people into song and conscience. When he addressed the Brahmaputra in Bistirno Parore, he bemourned the river metaphorically for flowing indifferent to human apathy and exploitation. The river, in his song, became the image of a conscience — a question directed at ourselves. In Bhupen’s art, beauty was never an escape; it was an instrument of truth.

Zubeen, on the other hand, came when that moral metaphor had begun to lose its resonance. The insurgency had ebbed, the dream of an independent Assam had dissolved into fatigue, and the collective pulse of the land had quietened into the hum of individual ambition. Beneath this calm, however, grew a vast realisation — that society itself had degenerated, its moral fibres frayed, and the roots of corruption driven deep into the soil by years of turmoil, fear, and the twin violences of insurgency and counterinsurgency.

Zubeen gave shape to that sound. He began his career singing mostly of love and tenderness that carried the restlessness of youth and the yearning of a generation still searching for beauty amid disorder. Yet even in those early melodies, there was an undertone of ache, a suggestion that love itself was becoming fragile in a changing world. As years passed, his music turned inward and homeward — drawing strength from folk traditions, from the rhythms of nature, and from the shared sorrow of ordinary lives. His later songs spoke less of passion and more of impermanence, of the quiet suffering and meaninglessness that shadow human existence. He sang not to awaken others, but to express himself — a voice of contradiction in an age that mistrusted causes. He stood apart from the PR-polished singers of the new millennium who measured every word for market value. His speech, his songs, his silences — all of them were impulsive and human.

And when he uttered “ghenta”, it wasn’t a mere vulgarity; it was his rejection of hypocrisy — the mockery of a society that wore moral grace while hiding class and privilege beneath it. 
The word was a rupture, a strike against pretended civility. Where Dr. Bhupen Hazarika had asked the river to reflect human conscience, Zubeen hurled words at a society that had grown numb to conscience altogether. His rebellion wasn’t against injustice in the streets, but against falseness in the heart.

He moved among the affluent, but he never belonged there in spirit. Where Bhupen carried the collective dream as moral responsibility, Zubeen carried its fragments — jagged, confused, sometimes self-destructive, yet unmistakably real. His music was the soundtrack of a generation that had lost its collective voice but still refused silence. He did not sing for movements; he sang for moods — for the interior storms of those who no longer trusted the promise of change.

For many who lived in his time yet felt detached from his world, Zubeen remained both near and unreachable — a man of their own generation who embodied everything they could not reconcile: success without peace, rebellion without revolution, fame without belonging. And yet, beneath the noise and contradictions, there was something hauntingly honest in him — a stubborn refusal to pretend that the world still made sense.

Now that his voice has fallen silent, it is easier to hear its meaning. Not the moral certainties of Dr Bhupen Hazarika’s era, but the trembling of a man standing between two centuries, unsure which language could still speak truth. In that trembling lies the truth of a changing Assam — a land that once sang as one river and now murmurs in a thousand disconnected streams.

Perhaps that is why both men must coexist in memory. Dr Bhupen Hazarika reminds us that art can still ask moral questions through beauty. Zubeen reminds us that beauty itself can become a question when the world loses its moral rhythm. One sang to awaken; the other to endure. One sought conscience, the other confession. Together, they complete the sound of a land still learning to listen to itself.

The author is a professor in the Department of Geology, Gauhati University. Views are personal. 

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