तुझे मेरी क़सम

'Tujhe Meri Kasam' closes the documented ten-song list of Chand Tara (1945). It is an Amirbai Karnataki solo, composed by Gyan Dutt to lyrics by Swami Ramanand Saraswati. The title is a complete idiomatic utterance rather than a description — 'my oath upon you' — and it belongs to a small class of Hindi phrases that do something rather than say something: to speak it is to place an obligation on the listener. Nothing about the sequence survives; the film is not in circulation and no synopsis has been located.

An oath song is written to be delivered rather than sung around: the melodic line stays close to speech at the moment of the vow and opens out only afterwards, because a phrase that carries legal-emotional force loses it under ornament. Gyan Dutt's slow numbers of the period tend to place the title phrase at the top of the mukhda with minimal accompaniment behind it and let the instruments answer in the gap, a structure common across Bombay composers of the 1940s and well suited to a voice like Amirbai Karnataki's, which was strongest when unhurried and low.

'Kasam' in Hindi is not the English 'oath' in the courtroom sense. Placed on another person — tujhe meri kasam — it transfers obligation: I swear by myself, and by doing so I forbid you. Mothers use it on children, lovers on lovers, and it works because the person sworn upon cannot decline the oath once it is spoken. In film lyrics this makes it the strongest available device short of a curse, and it usually appears at a point of departure or refusal, where one party is trying to stop the other by the only means left. Placing such a phrase as the title of the film's last song suggests it fell late in the story, though nothing confirms the order.

Chand Tara's soundtrack was preserved because Hindi film song registers — the Hindi Film Geet Kosh tradition and the online catalogues built from it — record songs, singers, lyricists and composers even for films whose prints are gone. That is why a picture with no surviving synopsis still has a complete, attributable ten-song list. Gyan Dutt would go on to score Sunehre Din (1949) and to give an early break to Geeta Roy in 1948; Amirbai Karnataki's credited career runs to 1961 and she died in 1965; Charlie left for Pakistan in 1947.

No recording of this song is known to circulate and it has no independent reputation. Completing the list is its purpose here: with all ten songs entered, Chand Tara ceases to be a title with a fragment attached and becomes a fully reconstructed soundtrack — which is the only form in which a film like this can now be studied at all.