Bhupen Hazarika At 100: The Bard Of Brahmaputra Who Sang India

I was eight when I first stumbled upon an old black-and-white photograph of my grandfather, sitting with a harmonium, singing alongside Bhupen Hazarika at an All India Radio recording session. The image fascinated me. I begged my grandfather to introduce me to the man whose name carried such weight in our household. He promised he would. But Bhupen Hazarika passed away before that promise could be fulfilled. Even so, the photograph became a portal, linking me to a voice that had already spanned three generations of my family.

For us, as for countless Assamese homes, Hazarika was not merely a singer; he was part of the air we breathed, the soundtrack of our evenings, the conscience of our culture. His centenary, then, is not a distant commemoration but a deeply personal reminder of how one man’s voice could bind time, memory, and people together.

His centenary is not only a commemoration but a reminder of how one man’s voice could bind time, memory, and people together, not just in Assam but across India and the world. Dr Bhupen Hazarika stands not merely as a cultural figure of Assam but as one of the rare voices who gave India a universal soundscape.

Hazarika was never confined to a single role. He was as much a troubadour of the Assamese folk tradition as he was a modern intellectual shaped by Columbia University’s cosmopolitanism. He was a filmmaker who gave Assamese cinema its vocabulary, a lyricist whose words carried the weight of both joy and protest, a politician who sought to translate cultural capital into public good, and above all, a social activist who believed in the power of song to heal fractured societies.

Yet, to call him only Assam’s bard is to miss his deeper achievement. Hazarika was perhaps India’s truest balladeer of unity; his music transcended caste prejudice, ethnic divides, and linguistic barriers. In an age when politics often sharpened the lines of identity, he sang of a larger belonging, of rivers that connect rather than separate, of humanity bound by shared struggles. It is this pan-Indic and universal spirit that gives his centenary its symbolic weight. Bhupen Hazarika did not merely sing for Assam, he sang for India, and through India, for the world.

Early Life and Influence

Bhupen Hazarika was born on 8 September 1926 in the small town of Sadiya, then part of undivided Assam. His family belonged to the Kaibarta community, traditionally considered a Scheduled Caste. In a society still weighed down by caste hierarchies, his rise to eminence was itself an act of defiance. From a young age, he seemed destined to break barriers, be they musical, social, or intellectual.

Gifted with an innate sense of melody, Hazarika began singing and composing as a child. His first recording came when he was barely ten years old. Yet, unlike many artists whose paths are defined only by talent, Hazarika combined his musical gift with academic brilliance. After graduating in Political Science from Banaras Hindu University, he secured a scholarship to Columbia University, where he completed his PhD in 1952. That journey from the riverbanks of Assam to the intellectual heart of New York was transformative.

At Columbia, he encountered new worlds of thought: global music, modern poetry, and above all, the ferment of the civil rights movement. It was here that he met and befriended the African-American singer and activist Paul Robeson, whose deep baritone carried the struggles of oppressed peoples across continents. Robeson’s iconic rendition of “Ol' Man River” made a profound impression on Hazarika. He reimagined it in Assamese as Bistirno Parore, a song that asked the great Brahmaputra why humanity, despite sharing the same river of existence, remained divided by inequality and injustice. Hazarika also translated it into Hindi, "Ganga Behti Ho Kyun?," for a much wider national audience.

In giving Robeson’s universal anthem a local cadence, Hazarika performed a subtle but powerful act: he linked Assam’s folk idiom to global struggles, showing that the plight of the oppressed was neither provincial nor parochial. It was human. This early fusion of the local and the global, born of his own journey across continents and caste boundaries, would remain the signature of his music for decades to come.

Hazarika’s music was never an ornament to culture; it was its conscience. Drawing from Assamese folk traditions and modern orchestration, sung with his splendid baritone, he created a style that was instantly recognisable yet endlessly adaptable. What distinguished his compositions was not only their melody but their message.

The themes that ran through his songs were universal: brotherhood, equality, the dignity of labour, and resistance against oppression. To a society fractured by caste, class, and ethnic divisions, Hazarika offered a vocabulary of solidarity. His songs spoke of the boatman and the weaver, the farmer and the fisherman, figures who rarely found a place in the elite imagination, but whose lives were the bedrock of Assamese and Indian civilisation.

He sang of poverty not as a statistic but as a lived condition, lending voice to the voiceless. At a time when linguistic and ethnic politics often hardened into hostility, he composed for harmony across communities, reminding listeners that rivers, labour, and dreams were shared. In Bistirno Parore, for instance, the Brahmaputra itself becomes a metaphor for humanity’s collective journey; wide, powerful, and capable of nourishing, yet scarred by man-made barriers.

For Hazarika, music was not a retreat from reality but an intervention within it. His concerts were as much public forums as performances, where songs doubled as sermons against injustice. In this sense, his compositions were vehicles of social change, carried from the remotest Assamese village to the biggest stages of Bengal and Bombay. They entertained, yes. But more than that, they educated, agitated, and united.

Music as Social Voice

In the 1960s, the Assamese-Bengali language conflict flared violently when sections of Assamese society demanded exclusive recognition of Assamese as the state language. Protests, counter-protests, and riots left deep scars, polarising communities that had long lived side by side.

It was not an easy stand. For many Assamese nationalists, Hazarika’s call for harmony was seen as betrayal. To defend the “other” in the middle of an identity-driven movement was to invite isolation, even anger, from one’s own community. But Hazarika’s conviction was clear: culture could not be weaponised against culture, and music could not be reduced to the language of division.

Through their performances, Hazarika and Biswas brought the message of peace, fraternity, and coexistence to audiences charged with suspicion and rage. They sang not to one community or another, but to both, invoking rivers, fields, and festivals that bound people together long before politics divided them.

This episode remains one of the most striking examples of his moral courage. Hazarika could have taken the safer route of silence, or worse, lent his voice to the dominant wave of Assamese exclusivism. Instead, he risked unpopularity to uphold a larger truth: that the true task of an artist is not to mirror public sentiment, but to challenge it when it strays from humanity.

Another example is from the 1990s. Assam was then in the grip of insurgency, with the ULFA unleashing violence across the state. The Indian Armed Forces launched Operation Rhino to suppress the movement. For the Left intelligentsia, state repression under the then Chief Minister Hiteshwar Saikia was unconscionable.

Hazarika, however, chose to stand by Saikia. He believed that insurgency would only bring ruin to Assam and that peace and development could not be achieved through violence. His endorsement of Saikia’s government provoked backlash, especially from Left-leaning circles. The respected Assamese leftist scholar Hiren Gohain went so far as to call Hazarika “Randi Saheb Chamcha,” a deeply personal insult implying he had become a stooge of power.

Yet, Hazarika held his ground. To him, supporting Saikia was not about defending the government but about rejecting the cult of violence that insurgency had unleashed. Much like in the 1960s, he had once again chosen the unpopular side, this time not against Assamese nationalism in its cultural form, but against its militant avatar.

During this time, he also mentioned in an interview:

"We Assamese people were never secessionist. Some people are shouting that we should go out of India. Mahabharata ka maha-anga hain Assam-Kamarupa. Kamakhya, idhar (south) Kumarika, waha (north) Kashmir: ye sab ek, this triad was always there since Mahabharata days. So who are we to be told to secede from India? We are very much Indian, only with little rūpāntar."

His choices were never free of controversy, but they revealed a consistent pattern: his willingness to stake reputation and popularity for the nation’s unity and integrity, and what he believed to be Assam’s greater good.

Going against the tide, he remained an unabashed champion of Bhāratīyatā, unafraid to confront anyone who sought to challenge and weaken India’s unity.

Political Forays

By the early 2000s, however, Hazarika’s path took a new turn. He joined the Bharatiya Janata Party and in 2004, he contested the Lok Sabha elections from Guwahati on a BJP ticket. To some, it seemed an unexpected move; to others, a natural progression. The BJP’s call for cultural rootedness and civilisational nationalism resonated with his long-standing belief that India’s diversity could only be sustained by a larger Indic unity. In aligning with the party, Hazarika was not abandoning his universalist humanism, but rather reframing it within a broader nationalist idiom.

Electoral politics, however, did not return the warmth his music had always commanded. Despite his stature as Assam’s most celebrated cultural icon, Hazarika lost the election. The reasons were many, but one factor stood out sharply: caste prejudice. As a member of the Kaibarta community, his candidacy ran into the invisible but powerful barriers of Guwahati’s bhadralok hierarchy. That an artist who had given voice to the entire region could still be constrained by caste bias was a painful reminder of how deeply entrenched such divisions remained.

This episode underscored the paradox of Bhupen Hazarika’s political journey. On one hand, his joining the BJP marked a later-life alignment with civilisational nationalism, signalling his faith in a larger, integrative vision of India. On the other, his electoral defeat revealed how far society still was from embodying the fraternity he had sung of all his life. If his music elevated him above narrow boundaries, his foray into politics exposed the limitations of moral authority in a world of hard arithmetic and hardened prejudices.

Yet, through it all, Hazarika remained what he had always been: an artist first, an Indian above all. His politics, like his songs, were driven not by personal ambition but by a restless search for unity in a fragmented land.

Legacy Beyond Music

Bhupen Hazarika will forever remain the voice of Assam, but his legacy cannot be confined to one state or one language. He was an internationalist, inspired by global movements and civil rights struggles, yet deeply rooted in the folk idioms of his homeland. Above all, he was a champion of pan-Indic unity, who saw in India’s diversity not a threat but a deeper rhythm waiting to be harmonised.

His songs continue to live in multiple registers. In the villages of Assam, they are sung in the glow of evening lamps as folk memories. In student movements, they rise as anthems of resistance. In political protests, they echo as calls for dignity and justice. Few artists have carried such range, crossing from cinema halls to picket lines, from riverside festivals to national stages, always with the same emotional force.

As a cultural icon, who gave Assam its voice in the modern world.

As a social conscience, who sang for workers, farmers, and the oppressed with equal tenderness.

As a political figure, who dared to defy both caste prejudice and linguistic chauvinism, even at the cost of popularity.

His life is a reminder that music, when rooted in soil yet attuned to humanity, outlives politics and prejudice. The world may remember him as the Balladeer of the Brahmaputra, but the river he sang of was never just Assam’s but the river of humanity itself, flowing wide, turbulent, and eternal.