Co-editors: Dr Debarshi Prasad Nath and Dr Swikrita Dowerah

Across the world, the deaths of cultural icons, from Michael Jackson and Fela Kuti to Freddie Mercury and Maradona, have shown how celebrity grief can generate powerful forms of collective affect, solidarity, and mobilisation. The unprecedented response to the death of Zubeen Garg on September 19, 2025, offers a striking recent instance of this global phenomenon. A prolific singer from Assam in Northeast India, Zubeen became the focal point of an immense transnational wave of mourning that blurred boundaries between fandom and political expression, online and offline publics, and local identity and global visibility. Media reports record the gathering at his cremation as the fourth-largest congregation in the world (Limca Book of Records), transforming the site into a space of pilgrimage and sustained political debate. As his body was flown in from Singapore, people across ethnic, linguistic, religious, and political divides gathered on the streets of Guwahati, marking an extraordinary moment of solidarity in a region otherwise fractured by tensions over ethnicity, indigeneity, and uneven development.

Against this backdrop, Zubeen Garg’s life and afterlife offer a compelling case for examining fandom, affect, and the figure of the “people’s star” in the collective imagination of diverse communities. His music, embraced across the Northeast, foregrounded the region’s tribal and plural foundations and articulated a non-exclusionary nationalism—neither anti-Hindi nor anti outsider. Since Anamika (1992), his work has combined vernacular aesthetics with pan-Indian and global forms, exemplifying the fluid and translocal nature of contemporary Asian ethnic identities.

Extending beyond music into Assamese cinema and public life, Zubeen’s cultural interventions illuminate how ethnicity in Northeast India is produced not only through political movements and institutions, but also through popular culture, affect, and everyday fandom. His death invites urgent questions that resonate far beyond Assam or South Asia: How do popular artists in the Global South become key mediators of ethnic identity, collective aspiration, and political critique? In what ways do celebrity fandoms function as affective ethnic publics, generating solidarities that cut across linguistic, tribal, religious, and regional divides in contexts marked by historical fragmentation? How are ethnic belonging and cultural citizenship rearticulated through popular music and performance in moments of collective grief and mobilisation? And how might Zubeen Garg’s humanist, socialist, and defiantly plural ethos help us rethink the role of artists in shaping inclusive, non-exclusionary ethnic imaginaries within contemporary public life?

By situating Zubeen Garg within broader debates on ethnicity, popular culture, and media in Asia, this special issue invites contributions that rethink Northeast India as a dynamic site of ethnic production, where artists and fandoms shape collective identity, political consciousness, and claims to belonging. More broadly, by engaging debates on celebrity culture, affective publics, fan activism, ethnicity, and the politics of popular music, this call for papers seeks to reassess the global stakes of cultural icons and the forms of community, justice, and belonging their lives and deaths continue to animate.

We invite contributions that engage with, but are not limited to, the following indicative themes:

1. Assamese ethnicity and Zubeen Garg
2. Zubeen Garg and Cultural Citizenship in Northeast India
3. Ethnic solidarity and the role of the artist
4. Digital Ethnicity and Platformed Fandom
5. Ethnicity, Ecology, and Place-based Identity
6. Music, Memory, and Ethnic Inheritance
7. Dynamics of Zubeen’s fandom
8. Zubeen Garg and the revival of Assamese cinema
9. Influence of pan Indian traditions and Western influence in Zubeen’s songs
10. Zubeen as a social/political commentator
11. Zubeen’s vision of Assam and Northeast India
12. Zubeen as an environmental advocate
13. Zubeen and the roles and responsibilities of the artist
14. Zubeen – the performer
15. Zubeen and Assamese nationalism
16. Zubeen: Towards a reconstruction of a comprehensive philosophy
17. Zubeen in the times of social media

Please send an extended abstract to both co-editors, Dr Debarshi Prasad Nath (dpnath1975@gmail.com) and Dr Swikrita Dowerah (swikrita@gmail.com), by February 20, 2026, with the subject line: “Submission for Special Issue: Zubeen.”

Note: The Routledge journal Asian Ethnicity has expressed interest in publishing this special issue.  Asian Ethnicity is a Scopus-indexed (Q1) journal. Accordingly, abstracts and manuscripts will undergo a rigorous peer-review process before being considered for publication.

Submission Formats and Word Limits

Extended Abstracts (3000 words): Should include key arguments, theoretical/conceptual frames, methodology, and relevant case studies (if applicable).

Special Issue Editor(s):

Debarshi Prasad Nath, Department of Cultural Studies, Tezpur University, Assam, India Email: dpnath1975@gmail.com

Swikrita Dowerah, Symbiosis Centre for Media and Communication, Symbiosis International (Deemed University), Pune, India Email: swikrita@gmail.com