Zubeen, the person, may no longer be with us in existence, but Zubeen, the sound, remains deeply embedded in Assam's seasonal consciousness. Bihu continues, as it always has, but it now does so in quotation marks-always referencing a voice that reshaped how the festival was heard, recorded, circulated, and emotionally inhabited.

This is not an obituary.
It is a cultural reckoning.

Bihu, after all, is older than any singer. It has survived floods and famines, kings and regimes, radio waves and recording studios. Yet rarely has a single voice come to inhabit a season so completely that its absence feels like a climatic change rather than a personal loss. What Assam confronts today is not merely grief for a beloved artist, but a deeper question: what happens to a living tradition when its most influential modern interpreter becomes memory?

Before the Studio, Before the Star

Before Zubeen, Bihu was primarily situated-rooted firmly in place, time, and community. It belonged to courtyards where young men and women teased each other in verse, to muddy fields where bodies danced without choreography, to riverbanks where voices rose and dissolved into the evening air. Bihu geet were not "tracks"; they were moments. They were sung because it was Bohag, because the earth had turned, because the body needed release after winter's restraint.

The singer mattered, but the song mattered more. Voices were replaceable; seasons were not.

Even when Assamese cinema and All India Radio began recording Bihu, the music retained a collective spirit. Pioneers like Khagen Mahanta shaped its modern sound, but Bihu did not yet revolve around an individual star. It revolved around the agricultural calendar, youthful desire, earthy humour, coded rebellion, and ritualised joy. Listening was communal and ephemeral. You heard Bihu because you were there, because it was April, because drums announced themselves before you could choose to listen or not.

Bihu, in that sense, was participatory rather than performative. It did not wait to be consumed.

The Arrival of a Voice

Zubeen Garg's arrival in the mid-1990s altered this ecology irreversibly.

His Bihu songs did not merely add to the tradition; they reorganised it. For the first time, Bihu acquired a dominant, recognisable, emotionally charged voice that listeners actively sought out-often before the season itself arrived. Zubeen's Bihu spilled beyond Bohag. It travelled in buses heading to distant towns, echoed in late-night hostel rooms, played endlessly in tea shops, and carried itself into the homes of migrants far from Assam.

What distinguished Zubeen was not just vocal range or musical skill, but emotional authorship. His songs bore a signature ache. They carried longing, restlessness, wounded masculinity, unresolved desire, and a modern Assamese subject torn between village memory and urban displacement. This was not the flirtatious confidence of traditional Bihu alone; this was vulnerability entering folk form.

Bihu, through Zubeen, learned to ache.

He sang not just of arrival, but of absence. Not just of spring, but of what spring reminds you you have lost.

The Cassette That Announced the Season

Zubeen's most radical intervention was not musical alone; it was technological and economic. The Assamese Bihu cassette industry of the 1990s was transformed into a seasonal economy anchored around his releases. A Zubeen Bihu cassette was not just music; it was an event. Shops waited for it. Auto-rickshaws played it on loop. Homes judged the arrival of Bohag by whether the new cassette had dropped.

This marked a profound shift from festival-led listening to artist-led consumption.

For the first time, people spoke of "Zubeen's Bihu" as if Bihu itself had an author. This was unprecedented in Assamese cultural history. Folk music entered the logic of celebrity culture without entirely losing its roots. Zubeen stood at a precarious intersection between folk and pop, ritual and reproduction, community memory and private ownership.

By the late 1990s and early 2000s, to imagine Bihu without Zubeen was nearly impossible. His voice became a sonic shorthand for Bohag itself. Spring did not just bloom; it arrived singing his songs.

When Bihu Became Personal

Perhaps Zubeen's most lasting impact lies in how he altered the emotional grammar of Bihu. Traditionally celebratory, his songs legitimised melancholy as a Bihu emotion. Separation, betrayal, migration, unfinished love-these themes spoke directly to a generation negotiating insurgency, economic uncertainty, shrinking rural economies, and urban alienation.

For Assamese youth growing up amid curfews, checkpoints, and dislocated futures, Zubeen's Bihu felt intimate. It spoke to them rather than merely around them. Listening became solitary as much as social. Earphones replaced courtyards; replay replaced participation.

This was Bihu internalised.

The festival moved inward, becoming a soundtrack to private longing rather than a purely collective performance. Zubeen did not take Bihu away from the people; he brought it closer to their inner lives. But in doing so, he also made the season inseparable from his voice.

After the Body, the Archive

Now, with Zubeen no longer with us in existence, Assam enters an unfamiliar cultural moment: a festival outliving its most influential modern voice.

Bihu still happens. Drums still beat. Young singers still release songs, and algorithms still recommend "New Bihu Hits." Yet something has shifted. Zubeen's songs no longer compete in the marketplace; they hover in the atmosphere. They are no longer seasonal releases but archival anchors.

Every new Bihu song is implicitly measured against them-sometimes reverentially, sometimes anxiously.

This raises an uncomfortable question: has Bihu become too dependent on one voice?

The danger of canonisation is stagnation. When a living tradition becomes a museum of greatest hits, creativity risks turning into imitation. The fear of not sounding "enough like Zubeen" can paralyse innovation just as much as the desire to replicate him.

Yet erasing Zubeen is neither possible nor desirable. His contribution is historical, not optional. He did not interrupt Bihu; he became part of its story.

The challenge, then, is not to move beyond Zubeen, but to move through him.

Bihu as a Living Argument

Zubeen Garg did not destroy Bihu's collective spirit; he complicated it. He proved that folk forms could absorb modern emotions without losing legitimacy. He demonstrated that technology could amplify tradition rather than dilute it. At the same time, his dominance exposed the fragility of cultural ecosystems when star power overshadows plurality.

Bihu has always thrived on many voices-male and female, polished and raw, remembered and forgotten. Its strength lay in its refusal to be owned by one throat. The task before today's singers and listeners is to reclaim that multiplicity without denying the depth of Zubeen's imprint.

To sing Bihu after Zubeen is not an act of competition; it is an act of continuation.

The Season Remains

Bihu has always been about cycles-like sowing and harvest, arrival and departure, memory and renewal. Zubeen's physical absence is part of that cycle too. His songs remain not as substitutes for the season, but as companions to it, like old friends who walk beside you without insisting on leading the way.

The singer may be gone.
The season is not.

And somewhere between memory and melody, Assam continues to dance-listening, this time, to both silence and song.

(The author teaches media studies at EFL University, Shillong campus.)