The lush hilly terrain of Assam with Tea Gardens. Credit- Assam Tourism

This special feature on Assamese literature has come at a time when the void created by the passing away of Zubeen Garg, the unparalleled voice of this generation, is gnawing at the hearts of the people. Zubeen was a phenomenon. He arrived on the Assamese music scene—in the early 1990s—at a time when it was drifting moorless. His remarkable versatility and sharp ear for the earthy sounds across the folk and the urban global templates saw the reinvigoration of Assamese music, connecting the indigene with the contemporary. His compositions regalvanised a subdued industry with rich tonal succour, which the Assamese people came to expect with every new musical move of his. The response to Zubeen’s passing away has been unprecedented in Assam’s recorded history. There are two factors why people have felt so deeply about what he stood for and epitomised. The first is accessibility. Zubeen’s songs, lyrics, compositions and renditions are accessible to listeners whose individualities are widely varied and cut across generations. This sense of his being ‘our own’ was also brought about by his personality, which was without artifice. He served to articulate the voices of those who couldn't find the space or the wherewithal to express themselves. The second aspect that Zubeen represented was appropriability. People saw him as the neighbourhood wonderkid they could be at home with and have a claim on. Musically, and as a lyricist and composer with a penchant for literary avant-gardism, Zubeen bridged the gap between generations through his melodic hooks and captivating, yet nuanced, understanding of contemporaneity. The fact that he traversed across multiple formats effortlessly shows how art and the artist interfused to craft newer possibilities. With his passing, Assamese culture has lost one of its signature voices.

Contemporary Assamese writing is beginning to reflect both societal questions and structures of representation. Poetic ventures of several practitioners present articulations that are earthy in orientation with a focus on the materiality of language. This is manifested through subtle wordplays, which aspire to record the possibilities of emotivity in well-embedded social contexts. As poetic enterprises, some of these templates are governed by interesting attempts at situationality. Not all are successful, though. Overtly topical writing sometimes veers away from the nature of the word, drifting away to lose out in terms of the broader picture. The poems curated for this Assamese feature offer fresh yet rooted observations that evoke questions of identity and self-examination in distinctive ways.

The article on Assamese science fiction characterises the possibilities of looking at a subject from perspectives that aren’t closed either by design or imagination. For the nature of work being done in this genre, the developments are only now beginning to unfold, but the signs show worthy pathways being chalked for an interesting road ahead. Another article, on Mereng, offers an analytical view of a world where threads of understanding are engaged with, through the rubric of contemporary imperatives. The fictional piece brings home the converging dimensions of belief and perception to chart possibilities within the framework of acknowledged knowledge.

This year saw one of our stellar poets leave this world: Anubhav Tulasi. The foremost poet of the last several decades, Tulasi, was a remarkable imbiber of poetic values. Each of his collections has charted fresh ground—showcasing his gifted understanding of poetic reality. Constantly occupied by the possibilities of what words could or couldn't do, Tulasi saw each poem of his as a veritable sounding board where he tested the idioms of expression. This volume of Muse India carries a tribute to Anubhav Tulasi.

We believe that Assamese writing will chart newer grounds in the coming years, forging intellectual and imaginative bonds of expression, which will connect the cultural landscape to a wider global audience.