टूटी हुई किश्ती का बने कौन सहारा

"Tooti Hui Kishti Ka Bane Kaun Sahara" is the only solo given to Amar in Naushad's Sanyasi (1945) score, on a lyric by Pandit Madhur. It is the most heavily preserved side of the film: at least five separate digitisations circulate, including one taken directly from the shellac with the label visible, identifying it as HMV catalogue GE 3536, matrix CEI 23812, credited to Amar. The transfers vary in speed and pitch from under three minutes to nearly four, which is normal for shellac played back on different equipment.

This is the slowest and most exposed thing on the album. Naushad gives the singer a long descending melodic line with the accompaniment reduced almost to a drone and a sparse pulse, so that the whole record rests on Amar's control of a sustained note — a much riskier setting than the duets, and the reason the side reads as the film's serious statement. Amar's voice is light and slightly nasal in the manner of male singers before Rafi and Mukesh standardised a fuller tone, and the frailty of it suits a lyric about being unsupported.

The boat is the oldest image in the Indian devotional repertoire for a life in trouble — the bhavsagar, the ocean of existence, with the guru or god as the ferryman — and Urdu poetry inherited the same figure through the kashti of the ghazal, storm-tossed and looking for a shore. Pandit Madhur puts the two traditions on top of each other: a Persianate word, kishti, inside a Hindi sentence, asking a question rather than making a claim. 'Kaun sahara' — who will be the support — is an interrogative that expects no answer, which in a film about a renunciate points where such questions always point. The rest of the verse is not documented and no part of it is reproduced here.

Amar plays Mohan in the film opposite Shamim Bano's Radha, with the actor Ghulam Mohammed — who had also appeared in Sohrab Modi's Ek Din Ka Sultan the same year — in the title role of the sanyasi. Where in the story this solo falls is not recorded; no plot summary of Sanyasi survives in the reference literature. Naushad used Amar again in Keemat (1946) the following year, one of the three films he scored in 1946 alongside Anmol Ghadi and Shahjehan.

Five surviving digitisations from at least five different private collections make this, by the only measure available, the song of Sanyasi that people actually kept. It is also the one that best explains why the film ran a Silver Jubilee without producing a national hit: Naushad in 1945 was writing solid, serious, well-made numbers of exactly this kind, and the extraordinary material — Anmol Ghadi's songs — was one year away.