Zubeen: The River That Remembered Its Source
A metaphysical reflection on Zubeen Garg’s final conversation, his water metaphors, the sacral chakra, and the prophecy hidden in his words. Analyses Dr. Srabani Basu.
In his final conversation with the writer Rita Chowdhury, Zubeen Garg did not sound like a celebrity reflecting on success; he sounded like a seer on the threshold. His language had no filters, only tides.
“I love to swim. I don’t see how deep the sea is. I just jump. There’s nothing in sea…you just flow, you play with waves.”
He called the Brahmaputra the male river and expressed his wish that his body be set afloat upon it after death. When told that sailors need maps, he smiled and said:
“There’s no map, no lighthouse, and no ship. I’m just swimming.”
Then came his confessions, crystalline in their honesty:
“I cannot be controlled.”
“The only thing I’m afraid of is time.”
“There is no soul, only the brain and the heart.”
“Everyone is alone. I am alone, but strong.”
“I have no anchors. I have four houses, yet no home. I sleep in my studio.”
In those sentences lived an entire philosophy. One that fused Nietzsche’s Nothingness, Hindu mysticism, and the trembling intuitions of a man who already felt the sea calling his name.
The sacral chakra (Svadhisthana), situated below the navel, is the seat of water, the element of emotion, creation, sensuality, and surrender. It governs not the intellect but the tides of being: the capacity to move, to feel, to flow.
When open, one becomes intuitive, creative, and emotionally alive; when blocked, one feels isolated and empty. The sacral’s essence is connection through flow, yet Zubeen’s metaphors reveal the paradox: he is water, yet he feels alone amid the current.
That loneliness is not social, it is existential, echoing Nietzsche’s “God is dead” horizon where the universe no longer guarantees meaning. In that void, Zubeen chooses the only truth that still moves: the flow itself.
“I just jump,” he says which is an act of radical faith in experience when all metaphysical maps have dissolved.
By calling the Brahmaputra male, Zubeen inverted centuries of symbolism. Most rivers in Indian lore such as the Ganga, Yamuna, Godavari are feminine. But Brahmaputra, wild and untamable, embodies a masculine Shakti, the dynamic within the stillness, the current within consciousness.
His wish to merge with that river after death was not a poetic fancy but a tantric intuition: a return to the primal union of masculine and feminine, Shiva and Shakti, awareness and energy.
When he asserted the masculinity of the river Brahmaputra, he was recognizing himself in it – uncontrolled, immense, without anchor or shore. To float upon it after death would be to dissolve the human into the elemental, the self into the source.
“There’s no map, no lighthouse, and no ship. I’m just swimming.”
This line dismantles the ego’s scaffolding. The map stands for rational certainty, the lighthouse for external guidance, and the ship for safety. By renouncing all three, Zubeen articulates the ultimate sacral wisdom: life is not to be controlled, only experienced.
Map — Logic, plan, predictability → Meaning is discovered through movement, not charted in advance.
Lighthouse — External saviour, borrowed faith → The true beacon burns within.
Ship — Safety, social identity → The self is its own vessel; immersion is the journey.
Here, Zubeen’s philosophy merges Nietzsche’s amor fati, i.e., love of fate with the yogic art of surrender. To swim without maps is to affirm the chaos, to find freedom in uncertainty.
Water cannot be ruled; it only obeys its own gravity. Zubeen’s assertion, “I cannot be controlled,” is not rebellion but ontology. His very nature was flow; restless, searching, borderless.
Yet freedom is lonely. The same current that liberates isolates. The sacral chakra governs connection, and when its current becomes too strong, it can sever the very bonds it seeks. Zubeen’s solitude, “I am alone, but strong” is the shadow of his freedom.
He lived as rivers live, refusing banks, flooding forms, creating new deltas wherever he went. Every song, every improvisation was water finding a new path.
In Indian metaphysics, Time (Kāla) is both creator and destroyer. It is the current that carries all forms toward dissolution. For Zubeen, who lived in rhythm and pulse, time was the one element that could not be mastered.
To fear time is to sense the undertow of impermanence; the awareness that even the most beautiful note fades. It is the same fear that haunted Nietzsche’s Eternal Return: if everything repeats forever, what meaning can there be?
Yet the sacral chakra, too, is cyclical, it moves like tides, like the moon. Perhaps Zubeen felt that the tide was turning, that his wave was cresting toward silence. His fear of time was not cowardice; it was intuition.
When he said, “There is no soul, only the brain and the heart,” Zubeen stood at the crossroads of material realism and mystic truth. Nietzsche declared that there are no eternal souls, only the will to power; Zubeen reframed it biologically, the neural and emotional symphony that creates consciousness.
But in saying so, he was also hinting at the sacral mystery: that spirit is not elsewhere, but embodied. The sacral chakra is the seat where the divine becomes flesh, where feeling itself is sacred.
By locating divinity in the brain and heart, Zubeen grounded transcendence in biology. He was, in effect, saying what the Upanishads whispered long ago, “Sarvam khalvidam Brahma,” everything, even the flesh, is sacred.
The poster of his unreleased film Roi Roi Binale shows a blind protagonist stretching his hand to touch the sea.
This image is eerily autobiographical. The blind man cannot see. He must feel. The gesture toward the sea symbolizes the soul reaching for what cannot be grasped through vision or intellect.
In energetic terms, the sacral chakra perceives through sensation- through touch, rhythm, movement. The blind man touching water is Zubeen’s essence touching eternity, feeling the current that sight cannot decode.
It is as if his unconscious staged its own farewell tableau: the artist without maps, without light, without ship, reaching out through blindness to meet the element he always belonged to.
Zubeen’s references to Nietzsche’s Nothingness were not casual intellectual nods; they revealed a man who had stared into the abyss and found it beautiful. Nietzsche wrote that when one gazes long into the abyss, the abyss gazes back but Zubeen dived into it, singing.
Where Nietzsche’s Nothingness negates soul, Zubeen’s sacral wisdom fills that void with flow. He accepts that “everyone is alone,” yet finds companionship in movement itself. The river becomes both abyss and answer.
He transforms nihilism into rhythm: a musical acceptance that meaning is made in motion, not in metaphysics. This is the alchemy of his consciousness: turning existential emptiness into artistic fluidity.
“I have no anchors. I have four houses, yet no home. I sleep in my studio.”
The anchor is a symbol of stability; its absence signifies rootlessness, the condition of perpetual becoming. In chakra psychology, the absence of grounding usually belongs to the root chakra yet in Zubeen’s case, it was a deliberate transcendence.
Home for him was not a structure but a sound. The studio was the temple where his water-soul could flow freely. His homelessness was not deprivation but detachment, a renunciation disguised as rebellion. He had, knowingly or not, entered the monkhood of the creative spirit.
In Jungian terms, Zubeen’s unconscious was rehearsing his own dissolution. Every aquatic metaphor: swimming, playing with waves, merging with the river, was a rehearsal for transcendence.
The sacral chakra, the seat of emotion and intuition, had already composed its elegy. When his body finally returned to water, the metaphor became matter. The current he sang of took him home.
Zubeen’s life, viewed through the lens of the sacral chakra, becomes a hymn to flow amid Nothingness to the courage of living without maps, to the beauty of surrendering to change.
He embraced Nietzsche’s void yet refused despair. He feared time yet merged with timeless water. He was alone yet one with every wave. He had no soul yet sang as if every molecule of sound were sacred.
Now the Brahmaputra carries him not as loss but as resonance. For water remembers what the world forgets. Time, the only thing he feared, has dissolved into rhythm.
And somewhere beyond sight, perhaps like the blind man on the poster, Zubeen is still reaching, still touching the sea, still singing to the silence:
Nijanor gaan mor xekh hobo bhabo tumar bukut
“Flow, even when you fear time.
Flow, even when there is no map.
Flow, until you become the river itself.”
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