Zubeen Garg and the Omelas Paradox of Music, Freedom, and Sacrifice

The Hidden Cost of Art

In Ursula K. Le Guin’s fable of Omelas, a city’s beauty and joy rest on one terrible secret: the prosperity of the many depends on the concealed suffering of one. The image is a moral provocation: how much happiness is bought at the expense of another’s pain? Reading Zubeen Garg’s life through this lens is uncomfortable but revealing. Every concert, every anthem, every public smile carried a cost. Zubeen gave more than voice: he gave pieces of himself, time, energy, intimacy, that were consumed by a public that applauded and moved on. His joy was enacted on stage; his pain, private and often invisible. Unlike Omelas’s child, Zubeen was not oblivious. He knew when trust was broken; when managers exploited rather than protected him; when the machinery of fame turned compassion into commerce. Such exploitation is not exceptional: artists everywhere are embedded in circuits that harvest affect and convert it into visibility and profit.

Yet Zubeen’s art was not merely the output of a commodified soul. It was transformative. In moments of hate he sang love; in moments of sorrow he transmuted grief into melody. His renditions, whether of Baikuntha Gogoi’s Phool Phulok or his own compositions, revealed a cultivated empathy. When two classmates associated with ULFA died, he channelled sudden grief into the song Xunere Xojuaa Poja Johi Khohi Jie, an act that demonstrated how music can register, mourn, and hold political complexity without simplifying it. In a society that sometimes narrows career choices to the pragmatic, Zubeen’s mother feared for his survival as a musician; yet he persisted, and in doing so, reshaped cultural expectations in Assam.

Freedom, Sacrifice, and Moral Courage

Zubeen’s life was also a philosophical lesson about freedom. He loved, he erred, he laughed, and he refused to be a mere instrument of others’ ends. The tender confession to Garima, “My name is so clear in each of your heartbeats”, speaks of a vulnerability that underwrote his music. Perhaps it was this same sensitivity that made him uneasy with how he was portrayed in the constant swirl of media attention, a world that often celebrated his fame but rarely understood his depth. And now, in his absence, the true magnitude of his influence has become unmistakably clear. For Zubeen, creativity demanded sacrifice, and sacrifices came at the cost of his freedom, the freedom to live according to his own conscience. Yet he kept listening to his conscience, and he kept creating creatively. Immanuel Kant’s account of freedom as autonomy, acting in accordance with reason and dignity rather than appetite, helps us see Zubeen’s choices in a new light. He repeatedly refused to surrender his conscience to systemised extraction: he walked away from deals that hollowed his artistry; he criticised leaders across parties for corruption; he resisted having his creativity repurposed as a mere instrument of power or profit.

This stubbornness exacted a price. Creativity demanded sacrifice; sacrifice, at times, meant the loss of privacy, stability, and even the simple right to be cared for when vulnerable. Zubeen’s death following a seizure attack in Singapore draws attention to a paradox: public adoration does not guarantee institutional protection. The collective grief that his passing generated is profoundly unifying; religions and communities converged in shared sorrow, but it also forces a question: Does admiration translate into responsibility? The joy he produced, if built upon invisible exploitation, carries a moral cost that we must acknowledge.

Music, Politics, and Shared Humanity

Zubeen’s life acquires wider significance against the backdrop of contemporary Indian politics. Public intellectuals such as Pratap Bhanu Mehta have warned against political strategies that sharpen communal divisions for electoral advantage, “playing with fire,” he calls it, because such tactics erode the plural social fabric that democracy depends on. In that light, Zubeen’s music acquires ethical force: he united people not by ideology but through shared feeling. His songs crossed caste and religious divides; his public persona affirmed an inclusive Assamese identity to create a Bor Axom (United Assam).

To honour him is therefore a political act as well as a cultural one. In an era when political entrepreneurs profit from fragmentation, Zubeen’s legacy stands as a counter-model: art that fosters empathy and cohesion. Remembering him obliges us to ask how societies should treat their cultural agents, and how political leadership ought to protect the dignity and freedom that make art possible.

Sovereignty of Emotion: Grief, Identity, and the Politics of Memory

The public response to Zubeen’s death became startlingly large and politically charged. Thousands poured into the streets and social media to grieve, commemorate, and insist that Zubeen’s life mattered. In the days following his death, grief erupted into a moral and political force. Streets overflowed, digital spaces surged with the cry #JusticeForZubeenGarg, and even Singapore’s Prime Minister, Lawrence Wong, was drawn into the moral crosscurrents as fans and observers questioned the circumstances surrounding Zubeen’s passing abroad. This viral outcry, crossing borders and languages, shows how a regional artist’s life and death can illuminate global concerns about artistic exploitation, state accountability, and the human cost of cultural production.
Here, Partha Chatterjee’s distinction between civil society and political society is useful. Civil society, state institutions, bureaucratic logics, and the rhetoric of “development” seek to regulate, domesticate, and instrumentalise public feeling. Political society, by contrast, is the domain where people generate moral authority through practices outside formal institutional frameworks: rituals, petitions, fan cultures, and public mourning. The mass devotion that surrounded Zubeen’s death resembles the funerary and ritual politics that once turned film stars like M.G. Ramachandran and Jayalalithaa into sovereign figures in Tamil Nadu. In such moments, sovereignty is not conferred by legal office but is claimed by popular devotion.

That popular sovereignty unsettles rulers is not new. Assam’s Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma’s remark that many of the mourners were “fans created after Zubeen’s death” and “mobilised by parties” betrays a familiar anxiety within governance: that spontaneous public sentiment might outgrow institutional control. His warning of a “Nepal-like situation” reflects the unease that such unmediated emotional collectives, those outside the logic of party organisation or state planning, can generate alternative forms of legitimacy.
Yet what unfolded after Zubeen Garg’s death was not mere sentimentality. It was an assertion of authorship over Assam’s emotional and cultural narrative. In publicly mourning him, citizens reclaimed the right to define who represents their moral imagination, who articulates their sense of identity, and what counts as the true measure of a state’s well-being, something not reducible to developmental metrics or political agendas. In Partha Chatterjee’s sense, this collective mourning becomes pedagogical: people teach themselves, through shared emotion, the meaning of belonging and the boundaries of cultural sovereignty.

The Afterlife of a Voice

Zubeen Garg’s life and death are a paradox and a parable. Like Le Guin’s Omelas, they force us to ask whether the joy we celebrate is worth the hidden costs by which it is produced. Unlike Omelas’s child, Zubeen was conscious of the trade-offs and chose, time and again, to claim autonomy. His music, generosity, and fearless speech made him a moral figure, and his death turned that moral stature into a form of popular sovereignty.

As Assam and India head toward the 2026 elections, Zubeen’s legacy is an urgent ethical injunction. It asks political leaders to cease exploiting division for gain; it asks cultural institutions to protect creators rather than merely consume them; it asks civil society to recognise that public admiration must be matched by public care. Most of all, it asks the people to remember that a culture’s worth lies not merely in its spectacle but in the dignity of those who create it.

The songs remain, echoing over rivers and hills, carrying stories of love, loss, conscience, and resistance. If we listen carefully, we will hear more than melody: we will hear a call to honour freedom, to defy exploitation, and to make grief itself a teacher of solidarity. In that teaching lies the most fitting memorial to Zubeen Garg: a living culture that recognises the humanity of its voices before it turns them into icons.

Pallavi Devi is a lover of films and nature and is a Constitutional Law faculty member at Gauhati University. Views are personal.