Zubeen Garg was many things. He was a songwriter who changed Assamese popular music for generations to come. He was a singer whose songs you knew by heart long before you knew his name. He was, in a sense, a pan-Indian star two decades before the concept gained popularity in India.
More than anything, however, he was a figure with a mythic public persona, a mythology that was carved even deeper into the collective consciousness by an early, accidental death.
Dr. Prosenjit Nath's biography of the singer, Zubeen Garg: The Voice That Bridged Worlds, delves into the man behind the myth. It's a story the biographer has actively witnessed himself. Nath is from Silchar, Assam, belonging to the generation that grew up with Zubeen's music as ambient as weather: at festivals, on road journeys, at college gatherings and political rallies, in the private recesses of adolescence and youth. “Songs like Mayabini, Anamika, Ya Ali, and countless Assamese compositions shaped how many of us understood love, rebellion, loneliness, and identity,” he recalls. “Because of this emotional closeness, I had to consciously maintain a balance while writing the book. I did not want the biography to become either blind admiration or harsh revisionism.”
In Assam, and by extension in the North-east, Zubeen was a generational talent. He was the man who modernised Bihu for an urbanising, disillusioned youth that was drifting away from its roots to feel more connected to the mainland. He made being from the North-east feel contemporary. The rest of the country, however, listened to his songs without really knowing the voice behind these tunes, and would come to know of his importance only after his tragic accident in Singapore on September 19, 2025.
I, unfortunately, fall in the latter. In my Bengali household, where every 2000’s girl grew up having a crush on either Dev (Deepak Adhikari) or Jeet (Jitendra Madnani), few of us knew the man who voices our childhood stars. You just had to be there, learning the wackiest dance steps Dev tried to win over Rachana Banerjee in Mon Mane Na or bawled your eyes out in the sad version of Bodhua.
Somehow, it also never struck us that this was also the man who sang Ya Ali in Kangana Ranaut’s debut film, Gangster, or did the backing track for Pokhi Pokhi Bidekhi, which rings out when Shah Rukh Khan’s Amar sneaks into Meghna’s (Manisha Koirala) house for the first time in Mani Ratnam’s Dil Se. Talk about range.
I ask Nath about the many audiences that Zubeen had: his Assamese listeners, the Bollywood fans, diaspora listeners who couldn't connect to all the cultural elements in his songs, but would attend his international concerts either way. Everyone would have a different memory of him. Who would this book be for? “Garg himself refused to remain confined within one identity,” is the reply. Would it really be fit for a biography, then, to cater to only one identity?
Upon re-reading the book after the interview, I realise how true this is. To me, a listener with very little knowledge of what the singer was like, the book felt almost educational. Now, with more context, I could point out that somehow, at the same time, Nath had managed to also make this a tribute to the singer, a work that hardcore fans would revisit to bask in the celebration of the singer.
Nath does this by playing around with the idea of how all these personas coexisted and embedding this is with the reverence befitting a fan who would travel miles to see his favourite artist perform live.
To address a figure like Zubeen Garg, Zubeen Da, as he was called (Da meaning brother in Assamese), he spent months pulling at the seams of the public image Garg built over three decades: archived interviews, television appearances, podcasts, collaborators, and journalists who had known him across different chapters of his life. At the end of the tunnel was a picture of Zubeen Borthakur, the man who had music so deeply ingrained in his upbringing that it would have been a surprise had he been anything but a musician.
It makes you wonder sometimes, how much say did Zubeen even have over the grand fate that was destined for him? He rebelled against his parents to have this career, sure–the book makes this plenty clear. But was music actually as freeing as he had initially imagined it would be?
"The real Zubeen was extraordinarily gifted but also deeply emotional, impulsive, vulnerable, and sometimes contradictory," Nath tells me. "He could appear fearless publicly while privately carrying loneliness and emotional burden.”
Sometimes, this emotional burden spilt over in unexpected places. At a 2024 interview with podcaster Aboyob Bhuyan, writes Nath, the conversation shifted from the usual discussion about his music to Garg admitting how, despite all his wealth and influence, he had no home to really return to. This podcast stands out in the books as one of the only interviews with a full sub-chapter dedicated to it. “I think it was part humility,” he says about this section, “but it also reflected something more painful. Artists like Zubeen Garg often live in emotional extremes. They give enormous amounts of themselves to their audience, their work, and their public life.” Very little of them remains in the end.
In that sense, music became both his cage and the open blue sky. He had fame, influence, recognition, and love from millions, yet there remained a void; a search for something he himself probably couldn’t put his finger on. And this search for that one something took Garg out of Assam and into the decade-long struggle of being a nobody to make it in Bollywood.
Nath's biography is, in the end, an act of excavation as much as remembrance. Almost a third of it is devoted to the circumstances of Zubeen's death in Singapore, the investigations and public grief that followed: written, notably, while the SIT probe was still active and speculations and conspiracy theories were still afloat.
"There was already enormous speculation, misinformation, and emotional outrage circulating publicly," Nath admits. "Maintaining dignity in the narrative became more important than dramatic storytelling." Yet, almost like a Greek tragedy, more effort goes into the public reaction around the death of Zubeen Garg than into the man himself, in the final months of his life. It's understandable, given the investigations that were going on at the time of writing this book. But you end up wondering about it anyway.
And so the task of finding that missing piece that Zubeen Garg probably had set out for all those years ago, turns into a task of picturing a star through the memory of who it shone upon. Did he find what he set out for? Was it a happy discovery? Was the pain and sacrifice worth it? One can only conjecture, but one would probably never know.