qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review
When the end comes, you go to Ram's own city.
And whoever is born there is called one of Hari's own people.
Anta kāla is the last time — the hour of dying. Devotional Sanskrit and Awadhi both use it plainly, without euphemism and without drama, and this line is no exception: it states a destination in the same tone the poem has been using for everything else.
Raghubara pura is the city of the best of the Raghus, which is to say Rāma's Ayodhyā — in Vaiṣṇava geography not only the town on the Sarayū but a place held to correspond to it, the one Rāma is in. It is the place the whole of the exile is measured against, and the line quietly offers the same arrival to somebody who was never in the story.
What the schools do with the last hour is one of the genuinely open questions, and the readings part company here. Advaita takes release as recognition: nothing is travelled to, because nothing was ever lost. The Vaiṣṇava devotional traditions take it as nearness or union — the soul arriving where it belonged, in relationship rather than in dissolution, and a named place is the natural language for that. Some hold that release can happen in this body, before any last hour at all. All three are reading carefully, and a verse like this one does not settle between them; it speaks the devotional idiom, which is the idiom of arrival.
And then the second line. What is offered at the end is not rest and not an ending — it is janma, birth, and a name: haribhakta kahāī, called one of Hari's own. Being someone does not stop. It continues, in particular company, and the reward named is what you are called there. That is a gentler thing than the line's opening leads a reader to expect, and it is what the verse actually says.
Where is the place you would most want to arrive at after being away a long time?
qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review·Devanagari checked against two printings·Draft — awaiting reviewer·How these texts were made