उम्मीद में बहती हुई नदी के

One of Datta Korgaonkar's three compositions for Yateem, with words by Zia Sarhadi. The singer of this track is not recorded in either of the two surviving song catalogues for the film, and no name is guessed here.

No commercially reissued recording of this track has been located, so its melody and arrangement are not described here from listening. Datta Korgaonkar — credited across the period as both Datta Korgaonkar and K. Datta — took the remaining three songs, making Yateem one of the mid-1940s films where two composers divided a single score rather than sharing it.

Alone among the eight titles, this one is a sustained metaphor rather than a statement or an address: a river whose flowing is done in hope. The image folds motion and expectation into a single figure — the river cannot stop, and its not stopping is itself the hope. It is the kind of construction one would expect from a writer with Sarhadi's background, who came to Bombay in 1933 having written poetry and short stories in Peshawar before he wrote for film. Zia Sarhadi wrote the lyric. Unusually for a director, he was a practising film lyricist in his own right — credited with the words for Kokila (1937), Hum Tum Aur Woh (1938), Teen Sau Din Ke Baad (1938), Ladies Only (1939), Sajani (1940) and later Anokha Pyar (1948) — so on Yateem he was writing the songs of a picture he was himself directing. No lyrics are reproduced here.

Yateem (1945) was directed by Zia Sarhadi at Central Studios, Bombay, produced by C.L. Divan and photographed by Keki Mistry, with Yakub, Chandraprabha, Lalita Pawar, David Abraham, Bhudo Advani and the young Suraiya in the cast. No plot summary for the film survives in the accessible record; the title, Urdu for 'orphan', is the only clue to its subject. It sits with Qayamat Hai Ki Hum Ek Bewafa Se Pyar Karte Hain and Shuru Hone Lagi Hai in Korgaonkar's share of the score.

Zia Sarhadi's reputation rests on the socially engaged films he directed after independence — Hum Log (1951), Footpath (1953) — and on his uncredited script consultancy for Mother India (1957). His pre-1947 lyric writing, of which this song is an instance, is the least examined part of that career, surviving mainly as credit lines in gramophone catalogues.