Zubeen Garg: Silchar that resisted imposition shows how to embrace as well

In the hush that follows a storm, the echo of a voice can resonate longer than the tempest itself. When Zubeen Garg passed away on September 19, 2025, he left more than silence: he left a tremor. In Silchar and across the Barak Valley, during this Durga Puja, his songs are omnipresent. Giant portraits of him stand outside pandals; loudspeakers carry strains of Maya, Mayabini, Buku Duru Duru and other signature numbers through the humid autumn air.

To understand this embrace is to recall a defining moment in Barak Valley history: the 1961 Bhasha Shaheed Andolon (Language Martyrs’ Movement). In the late 1950s and early ’60s, Assam’s dominant polity sought to impose Assamese as the sole official language, even in Cachar (now Barak Valley), where Bengali speakers formed the overwhelming majority.

The climax came on May 19, 1961, at Silchar railway station. A general strike had been called; protestors picketed, trains stood idle, and the Assam police opened fire. Nine people died on that day; two more succumbed later. Eleven martyrs in all.

The aftermath was profound. The Assam government conceded: in the Barak Valley districts, Bengali would remain the official language. Section 5 of the Assam Act XVIII of 1961 enshrined the safeguard. Every 19 May since, Silchar commemorates Bhasha Shaheed Divas with homage to the Shaheeds and cultural remembrance. This was not parochialism but dignity, the insistence that identity and mother tongue cannot be erased by decree.

Zubeen Garg embodied that spirit of refusal and embrace. His assertion – “Mor Kuno Jaati Nai, Mor Kunu Dhormo Nai, Mor Kuno Bhagawan Nai” (“I have no caste, no religion, no god”), was more than a lyric; it was a manifesto. He sang across tongues, genres and frontiers: Assamese, Bengali, Hindi, folk and fusion. His pan-Indian fame after Ya Ali did not detach him from the soil that produced him; it only widened his embrace.

The suddenness of his death, reportedly after a drowning emergency in Singapore, amplified the grief. He was 52. Even The New York Times carried notice of his passing, a rare acknowledgement for a singer from Assam. That foreign citation underlines his wider resonance: more than a regional icon, he was a pluralist voice in a fractured republic.

And so Silchar’s homage matters. Pandals carry his image not as an ornament but as a claim: he belongs here. His songs are played not as background noise but as a collective refrain. The city that once resisted erasure now proves it can honour without surrendering self.

Silchar was a city that refused to be overwritten. Today, it is also a city that absorbs, recognises and honours. Such loud reverberation of Assamese songs would have spurred a controversy otherwise, as did the Government ads that carried Assamese snubbing Bangla. But this year, Assamese songs and Zubeen Garg are parts of the fabric of Barak Valley. The death of Zubeen Garg and the manner of his memorialisation marks a landmark moment: the Valley, which defended its mother tongue, now shows the nation how to embrace without erasing.