Subcontinent Mourns an Indian Folk Hero: Choudhury

Bhupen Hazarika, one of India's most beloved musicians and perhaps the best-known face of the country's northeast, passed away last week, bringing to an end a scintillating career in the arts that began more than seven decades ago. Hazarika was popularly known as the Bard of the Brahmaputra, the river that appeared in many of his songs. He was mourned by a procession of hundreds of thousands of people when his body was brought home from Mumbai, where he resided in his last years, to Guwahati, in his native Assam.

If Hazarika had such a hold on the public imagination, it was because, firstly, he had a talent for fusing the classical and the popular, tuning the folk music of Assam into a new key and taking its rhythms into other languages. Secondly, he wrote many of his songs himself and his lyrics speaking of man's brotherhood across boundaries of nation and culture, carried a rousing humanist message that had a particular resonance in the worlds of Indian (and later Bangladeshi) nationalism and early republican life.