qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review
You are the watchman over good and holy people.
You tear the demons up by the roots. And Ram loves you dearly.
Rakhavārā is not a grand word. It is the watchman — the one who sits up, the one posted at a gate. The Chalisa has used it once already, nine verses earlier, where Hanumān is the rakhavārā at Rāma's own door and nobody gets past without leave. The second use quietly widens the first: the same guard, now standing over anyone trying to live well.
Sādhu and santa are close enough in ordinary use to read as one phrase, and a little apart under pressure. A sādhu is one who has gone out — renounced, taken up the discipline. A sant in the north Indian devotional vocabulary is one who has arrived at truth, and need not have gone anywhere to do it; weavers and cobblers and householders are called sant in exactly this literature. Between them the line covers both routes.
Nikaṃdana is from ni-kand, to dig up, to grub out. Not defeated, not killed — taken out at the root, the way you clear a weed you do not want back. The word carries its own gardening.
And then the last two syllables. Dulārā is what a parent calls a cherished child: darling, the pet one, the one who is fussed over. It is a domestic word, and it arrives at the end of a line about uprooting demons with no transition at all. Stuti does this constantly — the vast register and the intimate one set side by side without embarrassment, because the poet does not experience them as a contradiction. The line spends three-quarters of itself on what he can do and finishes on how he is regarded.
Who calls you by a name that nobody else uses?
qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review·Devanagari checked against two printings·Draft — awaiting reviewer·How these texts were made