Not Yours to Wear, Not Yours to Mourn

Anee Haralu -

Barely three weeks after his death, Zubeen Garg walked a ramp without being there.

At the Lakme Fashion Week held in Delhi from October 8 to 12, his face appeared on a saree. The model even wore a hat like the one Zubeen often wore on stage. Under the lights, the image looked perfect—balanced, nostalgic, cinematic. A rebel’s portrait turned into a pattern.

It was beautiful. And it was unsettling.

Because Zubeen was never meant to be curated. He was messy, restless, unpredictable. His voice cracked, his anger was public, his tenderness unfiltered. The Axomiya bhadralok called him bolia—mad. They weren’t entirely wrong. He refused to behave. He mocked celebrity and glamour, mixing village fair and rock stage, naam-ghor devotion and street slang. To see that unruliness turned into a controlled design felt like watching defiance ironed smooth. The same Zubeen who railed against the market’s falseness now returned as couture.

Fashion Week made it look effortless. A design house took the face of a man who unsettled institutions and placed it in a lineup with fabrics and seasonal palettes. The collection was described as “a tribute.” But what it really showed is how capitalism absorbs what it cannot explain.

Capital never destroys rebellion; it accessorizes it. It turns grief into product and refusal into trend. Like water, it takes any shape, flows through any surface, fills every profitable space. What cannot be owned can still be sold.

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This is not about outrage over fashion. People can wear what they like. It is about what happens when meaning loses its weight once it enters the marketplace. The market has learned to imitate sincerity. It sells rebellion as nostalgia and memory as lifestyle. The runway becomes another feed, the cloth another algorithm.

Zubeen stood outside that polish. His songs carried the raw edges of a region that refused to fit the grammar of the mainland Indian “centre.” To watch that texture turned into a luxury pattern is to see capital do what it always does—turn refusal into revenue.

This material appropriation on the ramp mirrors an earlier, digital one. Since September 19, when Zubeen died in Singapore, the cycle has been unbroken. The same week he passed, the national online sphere arrived late but arrived hungry. Suddenly the “Ya Ali singer” was everywhere. Thumbnails screamed “India’s hidden diamond.” YouTube creators whispered, “muje ye video banana para dosto.”

That was not mourning. It was extraction. The same logic that now turns his face into fabric first turned his death into data.

The Indian nation and the market share that instinct. Both absorb what does not belong to them. Both translate difference into digestible form. Zubeen fought one with words and the other with indifference. Both waited until he was gone to reclaim him as their own.

For decades, he stood apart from the idea of “One India” that flattens every accent and calls it unity. He sang in tongues the centre could not place. He mocked respectability, faith, and celebrity alike. He belonged to a geography the map treats as margin but that produced its own centre. His refusal to perform Indianness on demand was political long before anyone called it so.

That refusal is precisely what both nationalism and capitalism find intolerable. They respond by aestheticising what they cannot control. Che Guevara died fighting imperialism; now he smiles from vodka bottles. Zubeen mocked the cultural gatekeepers of India; now his likeness walks a designer runway.

The difference is scale. The logic is identical.

Zubeen’s voice—tender, full of local air—belonged to tea stalls, village fairs, bus radios, and tin-roof homes. It was the sound of endurance, not of polish. To reproduce that on a saree under theatrical light is to remove its friction. It becomes safe, exportable, pleasant to consume.

That is how power remembers: by making the inconvenient elegant.

Zubeen’s death triggered two parallel acts of appropriation. The nation claimed him through hashtags; the market claimed him through fabric. Both claim love but erase struggle. Both mistake possession for tribute.

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A month later, the hashtags have faded, but the appropriation continues—less noisy, more aesthetic, perfectly acceptable. That is how amnesia works now: through taste.

To wear Zubeen or to trend him is easy. To hear what he actually sang about—hunger, despair, small victories—is not.

He was a contradiction: spiritual yet defiant, Assamese yet borderless, ordinary yet impossible to copy. He refused purity, and that was his purity. He could be vulgar, tender, funny, furious—all in the same breath. That mix cannot be domesticated, which is why both the state and the market keep trying.

But Zubeen cannot be curated. He cannot be made to fit. His legacy lives in noise, not design.

To remember him truthfully means keeping that discomfort intact—to resist the urge to tidy him up for packaging. To let his off-key moments stay off-key.

Because once rebellion becomes wearable, it stops being rebellion. And once mourning becomes algorithmic, it stops being grief.

Zubeen belongs to neither.

Anee Haralu writes from Guwahati. She is an aspiring novelist.