When filmmaker Chinmoy Barma stepped off the ferry in Majuli, this Raas Mahotsav, the island introduced itself the way only ancient landscapes can — through the air. “The first thing I noticed was the air,” he said. “Cool, clean, carrying a soft sense of divinity, taking tiny steps into winter.” Only after that came the chorus: people moving toward the sattras, khol rehearsals thumping like a heartbeat under soil, and those unmistakable pre-Raas murmurs that sound like faith clearing its throat.
But this year, Majuli wasn’t just preparing for Raas. It was bracing around a very fresh bruise.
Assam hasn’t recovered from losing the singer and composer Zubeen Garg, and Majuli — always hyper-attuned to the emotional weather of the region — carried that grief. The island felt familiar, yes, but quieter. “The celebrations continued,” photographer Anirban Hazarika observed, “but with a quiet dignity, as though the island was honouring Assam’s cultural soul.” Tribute corners stood beside Raas stages like unplanned shrines. Cutouts of Zubeen da, draped in flowers, shared space with mythic tableaux. Groups walking to the pandals would inevitably slip into Mayabini.
Into this fragile terrain walked Chinmoy, Anirban, and writer Nilpawan Borah. They’d planned to document Raas. They ended up documenting the blurring of mythology and memory in a state that suddenly found its modern Krishna missing — a journey that would eventually become their photo series, The Voice That Became The River.
A group of children dressed as Krishna and the gopis stopped beside a cutout of Zubeen. They stared at him with the same curiosity and respect they gave the divine characters they were portraying. “That moment hit us,” Chinmoy said. “We knew Zubeen da loved Majuli, but seeing children look at him the way they look at Krishna — that’s when we realised this had to be something deeper.” A Mising man broke down while telling them his five-year-old daughter prays daily, chanting Joi Zubeen da. At that point, the team understood: this wasn’t just a documentation project.
When Chinmoy suggested drawing a parallel between Krishna and Zubeen, it was a recognition of what Assamese people were already doing emotionally. “Divine, for me, means purity of art — and it’s personal,” Chinmoy explained. “Someone who feels like he belongs to us, who lifts our spirits the way prayer does. Zubeen da was that.” Anirban added his own definition: “Divine is when an artiste’s work becomes larger than the artiste himself.” Zubeen, he said, shaped the emotional vocabulary of Assam. Nilpawan took it further. “Each of us carry a fragment of divinity,” he said. “A few embody it fully. Zubeen expanded that divinity into action — into courage, into art, into compassion. He was always divine but people simply didn’t see it until he was gone.”
Their conceptual anchor came from an unlikely coincidence. Nilpawan happened to be reading an essay by Jyoti Prasad Agarwala, where Krishna is described not merely as a deity but as the personification of human culture itself. That cracked the whole idea open. If Krishna symbolises complete consciousness, then why not Zubeen, whose life stitched together rebellion, tenderness, and cultural identity?
The team divided roles but quickly outgrew them. Chinmoy shaped the vision; Anirban — a Majuli boy — opened doors, read the island’s emotional temperature, and led them through hidden cultural arteries. Nilpawan worked on the cultural context and captions, co-writing the narrative frame. And the island’s people contributed more than any of them expected. “Majuli felt like home,” they said simply.
Some moments were too heavy for the camera. At Kamalabari Ghat, during a sunset that stained the river gold, the three stood silently. “We didn’t speak, we didn’t pick up the camera,” they recalled. “We just breathed.” The emotional risk was obvious, so they chose to lean into sentiment without cheapening it. “The first feeling of taking up the project was sentimental, and we didn’t let that slip,” they said. “Assam is sentimental after losing him. The art demanded the truth of our feelings.”
Calling Zubeen a “modern archetype” wasn’t flattery. He carried contradictions like they were accessories — rebellious but tender, outspoken yet spiritual, global in sound yet local in soul. As they put it: “He wasn’t a saint or a celebrity; he was a bridge between the sacred and the street.” He stood in the lineage of Sankardev, Madhavdev, Jyoti Prasad, Bishnu Rabha, and Bhupen Hazarika, but he expressed their spirit through film, pop, protest, and even chaos.
He represented freedom in its rawest, most inconvenient form. “I have no caste, no religion, no god. I am free. I am Kanchenjunga,” as he once said. As Nilpawan puts it: “When a human being fully embodies art and conscious love, they become a vessel for the divine. Zubeen was that. The world simply took too long to notice.”
And Majuli, this year, noticed it for all of us.