आहें न भरीं शिकवे न किए

From Zeenat (1945), 'Aahen Na Bhareen Shikwe Na Kiye' is one of Hindi cinema's most technically and emotionally ambitious qawwali sequences, featuring Noor Jehan leading a predominantly female ensemble through a lyric of extraordinary restraint: a woman who kept her grief wholly interior, who communicated only through her eyes. Ghulam Haider's setting draws on the rhetorical build and rhythmic acceleration of the Lahore qawwali tradition — the form that Haider knew from his Punjabi musical upbringing — while Hafeez Jalandhari's Urdu verse supplies the classic maqta-less ghazal structure that made the lyric feel both ancient and immediate. The song was unprecedented in Hindi cinema in its use of an all-female ensemble for a qawwali form that had, until then, been primarily a male domain on screen.

Haider builds the arrangement on the dholak-tabla rhythm that underpins Punjabi qawwali. The harmonium melody line is closely followed by sarangi, and the ensemble's overlapping responses build a texture of contained emotion that gradually intensifies across the song's structure. This is qawwali used not for communal ecstasy but for interior grief — an unusual application of the form.

Jalandhari's central conceit — a woman who suppresses all outward signs of grief (sighs, complaints) and communicates only through her eyes — is a reversal of the usual mushaira convention where the poet-speaker emotes dramatically. The restraint is itself the emotional statement: the most devastating grief cannot be expressed.

The qawwali sequence required Ghulam Haider to assemble multiple female singers — unusual for Bombay productions of the period. Noor Jehan led the ensemble, and the recording session has been described as one of the most intensive of her Bombay career.

Cited by subsequent generations of composers and listeners as one of the definitive pre-Partition film qawwalis — and the primary precedent for all-female qawwali performance in Hindi cinema. Its influence echoes in Gulzar's use of female ensemble qawwali in later decades.