- Lived:
- 8 September 1926, Sadiya, Assam → Tezpur, Banaras, New York, Guwahati, Kolkata, Mumbai; died in Mumbai, cremated on the Brahmaputra's bank at Guwahati
- Field:
- song — writer, composer and singer in one person, in Assamese, Bengali and Hindi; film-maker; the modern voice of India's Northeast
- The Big Idea:
- A song can be a public institution. He took the folk music of the Brahmaputra valley, fused it with the world's protest-ballad tradition he had heard in New York, and built a songbook that Assam, Bengal and Bangladesh all sing as their own.
- In their words:
- "If humans will not think of humans — who will?" — the refrain of Manuhe Manuhor Babey (1964), in close translation
- If you remember one thing:
- The man who asked the Brahmaputra why it flows in silence past human suffering was mourned by something like half a million people, and India's longest bridge now crosses his river carrying his name — touching down at Sadiya, the town where he was born.