कट गई वादों में कुछ

The bleakest lyric in the Dhamki score, and the one that steps furthest outside romance into something closer to a settled verdict on a life. The fuller title preserved in the Pakistan Film Magazine archive makes the structure explicit: part of it has already been used up in promises, and the remainder is expected to go the same way. The sources disagree on who sings it: the Hindi Film Geet Kosh names Amirbai Karnataki, the Pakistan Film Magazine archive and myswar name Zeenat Begum, and the hindigeetmala listing leaves the singer field blank. The Geet Kosh credit is followed here.

A slow ghazal-shaped setting is the only treatment such a lyric admits, and Amarnath's practice in this register was to keep the accompaniment out of the way — the accusation in the words needs space around it. The Hindi Film Geet Kosh gives this track to Amirbai Karnataki — the one Dhamki side it does not assign to Zeenat Begum or Munawar Sultana — and a singer of her experience could carry a long, slow line without leaning on the orchestra to fill it.

The lyric's power lies in its tense. Madhok does not complain about a broken promise; he reports that time has been consumed by promises as a category, and then forecasts that the remaining time will go the same way. That forecast is the cruel part — it forgives the past and condemns the future in one movement, which is a far colder position than grief. It belongs to the strain of Urdu verse in which the beloved's unreliability has stopped being a wound and become simply the weather.

Dhamki belonged to the last full working season of Lahore's film industry. Pancholi Art Pictures was, on Wikipedia's account, the largest film studio in the city, and it ran on a repertory model: a family director in Ravindra Dave, a house composer in Pandit Amarnath, a house lyricist in D. N. Madhok, and contract players including Ragini, Al Nasir, Smriti Biswas, Kalavati and Om Prakash. The Hindi Film Geet Kosh records the film's censor certificate as dated 18 December 1945, and the Pakistan Film Magazine archive records its Lahore premiere at the Palace cinema on 7 March 1946 — certified in one year, shown in the next.

Dhamki is not part of the living Hindi film song repertoire — no print of the film circulates and its records are collectors' items rather than radio staples. Its lasting interest is documentary. Pandit Amarnath was dead by 1947 — the music of that year's Mirza Sahiban is credited to 'Late Pandit Amarnath' — so this is among the last complete scores he finished, and the composer who had discovered Zeenat Begum around 1937, when she was still a child, gave her the largest share of it. Within eighteen months of the film's release, Partition had scattered everyone involved across a new border.