Fireflies in The Dark: Zubeen Da’s Mukti Three Decades On

“Xunere xojua poja johi khohi jaai-kune aaji xajibohi paribo dunai?”

(The gold-adorned haven has crumbled-who can build it again today?)

When Zubeen Garg sang this haunting question in the 1990s, he wasn’t merely composing a song, he was articulating the collective despair of a generation in Assam. Xunere xojua poja entered public memory not as a melody alone, but as an ache. It echoed through homes bruised by conflict, through villages emptied of sons, and through a society watching its promised dream slowly unravel.

The “gold-built haven” was never just a poetic image. It was Assam itself. The Assam Movement of the 1980s had promised a Xunor Axom--a land of dignity, justice, and self-respect. What followed instead was a decade marked by insurgency, state violence, and moral disorientation. Zubeen Da’s question--Who can build it today again?--cut deep because no one seemed to have an answer.

Mukti: When the Singer Became a Rebel

Released in 1997, at the height of the ULFA-State conflict, Mukti marked a turning point in Zubeen Garg’s artistic journey. Until then, albums like Anamika (1992) and Maya (1994) explored love and longing, while Zubeenor Gaan (1995) leaned into philosophical introspection. Mukti was different. It was the moment Zubeen stepped into the role of a public conscience-an artist refusing silence.

Strikingly, Mukti was not the hard-rock rebellion many expected from him at the time. Instead, it was restrained, poetic, and devastatingly honest. Through metaphor and melody, Zubeen critiqued both insurgent violence and state power, refusing easy binaries. His boldness culminated in a now-legendary remark-half defiant, half wounded-when he suggested that Xunere xojua poja deserved to be Assam’s anthem instead of O’ mur apunar desh. The controversy only reaffirmed how deeply the song resonated.

A Home Where Silence Screams

The verses of Xunere xojua poja sketch an intimate geography of loss:

Old mother’s tears dry by the hearth
Father stares endlessly into the yard
The child’s eyes unseen for ages
The beloved’s sky-no moon, no stars
Plough-oxen idle in the shed, fields lie dry
Night falls-and bullets speak

Zubeen doesn’t romanticize rebellion. He doesn’t sing of guns or glory. Instead, he lingers on what violence leaves behind-parents waiting, farms abandoned, love suspended. The line “Halor goru guhalite, potharu xukai” is devastating in its simplicity: livelihoods wither quietly while the sound of gunfire grows louder.

The final verse sharpens into an indictment of history itself:

Clutching at freedom, a hundred years gone
Yet Bishnu-Jyoti’s firefly land never came
Humans howl like monsters now
Culture, learning-everything hollow
Was this our twentieth-century dream?

The “firefly country” evokes the utopian visions of Bishnuprasad Rabha and Jyotiprasad Agarwala-icons who imagined Assam as a luminous, humane civilisation. Zubeen’s grief lies in the distance between that dream and the present wreckage. His refrain is not rhetorical; it is accusatory. Was this really what we dreamed of?

Andha Akash: When Death Became Ordinary

If Xunere xojua poja mourns loss, Andha Akash, Ruddha Botah dissects violence itself. It opens with a primal scream, plunging the listener into a suffocating moral darkness:

Blind sky, imprisoned air
A frightened night halts the moon
In the shut corners of blind minds
Bestial love pours unchecked
Liberation has lost its path
Every road leads death’s chariot

Here, Zubeen confronts a chilling truth: death had become normal. “Mrityu atiya xohoj”--death is now easy. Engaging in a poignant dialogue with his beloved poet Hiren Bhattacharya, who once called death an art, Zubeen asks with bitter irony: If death is an art, why has it become so cheap?

In one of the album’s most piercing lines, he questions the moral cost of armed struggle:

Dreaming of freedom--How much of the human is left in us?

The song’s final movement offers no political solution, only a philosophical one. As a flute softens the rage, Zubeen redefines freedom not as territory or sovereignty, but as inner awakening:

Free sky, calm air
Poetic night’s gentle moon
Freedom in the hand
Freedom in the soul
Freedom in the self

Ending with the Shanti Mantra, Andha Akash transforms from protest into prayer--an appeal for non-violence in a land exhausted by bloodshed.

Protitu Prohor: Grief Without Borders

Protitu Prohor universalizes pain through repetition. Every line begins with Protitu-every-turning individual trauma into collective memory:

Every hour
Every minute
Every second screams today

The song moves like a lamentation, its raw vocals and layered instrumentation capturing a society suspended in mourning. The image of “protitu premor xemeka saki”-the pale candle of every love-suggests hope that flickers but refuses to die. It is this fragile persistence that gives the song its timeless power.

Beyond Protest: The Quiet Currents of Life

Yet Mukti is not only an album of rage and reckoning. Its latter half turns inward, tracing the subtle streams of love, intuition, and resilience.

Obak Obak is almost meditative--a declaration of inner luminosity amid chaos:

Speechless, dreamlike
Light upon light--
Today, I am light

Here, Zubeen claims personal freedom, echoing but redefining the poetic self of Bhupen Hazarika. The closing line-“After two days, the same crying”-acknowledges emotional cycles without surrendering to despair.

Songs like Meghor Boron and Phool Phoolok reclaim tenderness. Love becomes transcendence, nature becomes refuge. In a land bruised by fear, these songs quietly insist on normalcy--the right to desire, to bloom, to breathe.

The Legacy of Mukti

Mukti endures because it is complete. It mourns without melodrama, protests without propaganda, and hopes without illusion. It captures Assam at one of its most fractured moments, yet refuses to let violence define the human spirit.

Through this album, Zubeen Garg emerged not just as a musician, but as the voice of a generation-one that dared to ask uncomfortable questions, grieved openly, and still searched for light. Nearly three decades later, the fireflies of that unfinished dream continue to glow-fragile, persistent, and necessary.

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